


Canis, Corvus, Curses

by jinkandtherebels



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Bookshop, Ladyhawke - Freeform, M/M, Reincarnation, Shapeshifting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-07
Updated: 2015-09-08
Packaged: 2018-04-19 16:04:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 49,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4752464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jinkandtherebels/pseuds/jinkandtherebels
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Merlin is an ancient warlock with trust issues and a shapeshifting problem. Arthur is an ex-king who sometimes turns into a bird and isn’t especially happy about it. Mordred is a teenage runaway hoping for some magic lessons--and oh, yeah, he may or may not have tried to kill them both in a past life. Well, isn’t this awkward. Also known as “the sorta-Ladyhawke AU”, wherein there are curses, reincarnations and lots of Post-It notes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> It’s been a long haul, but here we are again! Thank you so much to story_monger, Beta Extraordinaire, for hacking and slashing this thing into shape; thanks to narlth for the last-minute Britpicking; and many many thanks to my incredible artist whimsycatcher, it’s been fantastic working with you and your art is gorgeous! And of course thanks to the mods at Aftercamlann for putting this party together again!

.

 

 

.

Mordred is eight when he stumbles across the bookshop. The painted dragon sign over the shopfront reads _Ealdor Books_ , worn but still legible.

His mum won’t let him go in. “The man who owns the place is…a little bit odd,” she admits when pressed. Although she adds quickly, “I’m sure he’s a perfectly nice old man, but he is very odd.”

Mordred can’t get more of an explanation from her. She bribes him with ice cream and soon enough he’s forgotten all about it.

.

At fourteen, he’s just looking for a place to hide.

Honestly, he thinks the shop owner’s overreacting. He’d snagged a chocolate bar, that was all; it wasn’t the end of the world, but damn if the old man wasn’t chasing him like it was.

Forget the police—his mum is going to skin him alive if he gets caught. If they force him to go home.

The thought of going home makes his stomach lurch.

_Please_ , he thinks, still running with no direction. _All I need is someplace to lay low for a bit. If I can just get out of this, I promise, no more stealing. I’ll become a model citizen somehow. It’ll be my goal in life to be a productive member of society._

Mordred does this sometimes. It’s not praying, exactly, more like making deals with luck or fate or whatever higher power people think governs the order of things. And he’s never been one to shy away from something when it might help him get out of a scrape, so here he is.

And the thing is, he’d’ve quit doing it ages ago, chalked it all up to kids believing in anything and everything and left it behind, except that sometimes it actually _works_. Like magic.

Like the painted shopfront that he almost runs right past, only realizing at the last second that the place is empty.

He darts through the open doors into cool near-darkness, a bell tinkling softly over his head, the smell of dust and old things filling up his nose.

There’s no one here. Mordred lets himself take in a deep breath—

“Can I help you?”

—and nearly dies of heart failure when someone speaks out of the shadows.

_This is punishment, isn’t it?_ he thinks irritably at luck or fate or whatever it is. _You knew I was lying about becoming an upstanding citizen and now you’re trying to off me for it. Great. Thanks for nothing._

He turns around, though, because he’s really sick of running. The bookshop employee is standing there with a stack of books in his arms and something about him makes Mordred take a step back.

It’s not the guy himself, he’s more or less unremarkable—lanky, dark-haired and blue-eyed much like Mordred himself, albeit in possession of a fairly impressive pair of ears—but the look on his _face_.

He looks like he’s just seen a ghost. Which wouldn’t surprise Mordred much, in this place, and he suppresses a shudder.

“I’m fine, thanks,” he says politely. Shop workers don’t call the police on Polite Upstanding Young Men, even when they’re definitely meant to be in school, so Mordred’s dedicated some time to perfecting the illusion.

“You’re…” The man swallows hard. Mordred sympathizes; he can actually see thick clouds of dust drifting around. “What are you doing here?”

_All right, congrats Mordred, you’ve managed to find the one shop worker in the whole of England who actually will call the police on you for being out of school._

“I was looking for a book,” he invents wildly. “For an essay. I was wondering if you had anything…”

He lets the question drift off into awkward oblivion, mostly because the man doesn’t look like he’s listening. He’s wearing a red neckerchief, Mordred notices, because how can he not? Who even wears neckerchiefs? Anyone?

Bookshop employees who possibly moonlight as serial killers, apparently, and Mordred’s starting to feel deeply uncomfortable with the amount of scrutiny he’s getting. Especially since the guy has evidently surpassed shock and is now looking at him like Mordred just killed his kitten or something.

He’s considering just edging out of the shop and hoping the guy doesn’t notice, because it almost seems like he wouldn’t. But he resolves to try one more time.

“Hey,” Mordred says, raising his hands. “Look, I’m just—”

But that’s as far as he gets, because the second his hands are level with his chest Big Ears flips the fuck out and raises his own.

The books hit the ground, which registers second to the fact that Mordred feels like he’s just been hit by a fucking truck.

_I am **definitely** being punished for something._

He barely notices hitting the floor, barely notices that he’s rapidly blacking out, but he does manage to stretch his fast-blurring vision up toward the skinny man.

Gold is bleeding from his eyes, and it’s the last thing Mordred sees.

.

.

_“Help him,” Merlin shouts—pleads, and doesn’t care that it’s obvious. He has no room in him for posturing or pretending now, not when Arthur is dying in his arms. “I know you can hear me! **Help** him!”_

_“Why should we?”_

_Merlin turns so fast he nearly gives himself whiplash and sees what can only be the new Sidhe elder, bright blue skin and sharp white teeth gleaming in a deeply unpleasant sneer._

_The answer comes to him in a burst of terror-fuelled fury._

_“Because if you don’t, I will destroy Avalon,” Merlin swears. “I will pull away its waters and blast whatever remains with fire, and you will have nowhere to turn.”_

_He knows he can do it. He has the power, and, perhaps more importantly, he has the rage for it._

_Or he will, at least, if Arthur dies. But that is an ‘if’ that does not bear thinking about._

_The elder’s expression doesn’t change. “I do not question your power, Emrys. All the same, if we do you this favor, we will expect something in return.”_

_Merlin doesn’t hesitate. “Anything.”_

_With a mockingly gracious nod, the elder hovers down to inspect Arthur’s wound. It’s clean, not festering—Merlin made sure of that a thousand times over—but it’s killing him all the same._

_“A sword forged in a dragon’s breath,” the elder murmurs, almost to himself. “Impressive work. Even now the shard winds its way to his heart.”_

_He looks up, sudden and sharp. “I will require a promise from you, Emrys.”_

_“Anything,” Merlin repeats, hearing the desperation in his own voice; he doesn’t know how much time they have left, but Arthur’s breathing is shallow and harsh, so it can’t be much._

_The elder’s eyes narrow. “I will require you to swear that after this deed is done, you will never again set foot on the shores of Avalon. The Sidhe have suffered enough death and destruction because of your interference, and we tire of being summoned like servants to deal with petty human concerns. Swear it.”_

_“I swear.”_

_Those sharp teeth make another appearance. “In blood, Emrys.”_

_Excalibur is still on the ground a scant foot away. Still wet with Morgana’s blood._

_Merlin shoves the thought away and reaches for the blade, pulls it roughly across his palm and watches his blood spatter across the ground in the dying light._

_“I swear never to set foot on Avalon’s shores after this day,” he intones, steady despite everything in him screaming that Arthur is dying and this is no time for ceremony._

_“Very good,” the elder breathes. His eyes are fixed hungrily on the blood that stains the grass._

_Merlin doesn’t have time to question what he just did, to wonder if he’ll end up regretting it. It doesn’t matter. The elder could have asked for his life or his powers or his soul; the answer would have been the same._

_“I will keep my end of the deal,” he snaps. “Now do what you’ve promised. Keep him alive.”_

_The elder waves him off like an errant child. “Yes, yes. I will summon my brethren.”_

_He does, even if Merlin doesn’t hear anything resembling a summoning. But he feels something. A shift, a stillness in the air that doesn’t seem natural, and a strange note singing in his blood. Reverberating inside his head instead of outside._

_And then the Sidhe are with them._

_Merlin blinks and they’re there, the hazy light that haloes their kind blending together until it’s near-blinding. The elder speaks in a language Merlin doesn’t understand, and the light gets brighter, brighter, until he has no choice but to close his eyes against it._

_When he opens them again, the light is gone. As are all of the Sidhe save one._

_“It is done,” the elder tells him. “Your king will live.”_

_Merlin actually sags in relief. It’s like an incredible weight has gone from his chest, leaving him able to breathe like he hasn’t since Morgana trapped him in that cave, powerless and useless._

_“Thank you,” he manages. “I won’t forget this.”_

_The elder waves him off. “It matters not. You will leave us in peace; that is thanks enough. But remember this, Emrys—we do not reverse our bargains.”_

_He’s gone between one blink and the next._

.

Merlin doesn’t know how long he stands there like an idiot after the boy hits the ground, staring at the body crumpled on the floor in front of him like it’s going to disappear before his eyes. It’s possible. Stranger things have happened.

Stranger things, like the fact that _Mordred_ just walked into his fucking shop.

It’s not that he hasn’t wondered over the last two millennia about reincarnation and similar ideas. Many insisted that it was legitimate, that it did happen, and Merlin, well—Merlin became a damned cornerstone of mythological pop culture somewhere along the way, so who is he to judge? Once again: stranger things have happened. He can’t even remember the number of times he’s done a double-take as a stranger walked by, wondering if it might be Gwen or Lancelot or any other number of people—but then, he isn’t sure he would even recognize them anymore. It’s been…well. It’s been a while, and even magically enhanced memory is fallible.

Still. He never thought it would be Mordred.

Slowly, deliberately, Merlin unfreezes himself and sets down the stack of books he’s been holding for god knows how long. None too gently, either, as they send up a cloud of dust that makes him sneeze—he really needs to dust in here one of these days—but at least it shakes him out of his shock. Out of habit, he glances out the window.

_Ah, damn._ The sun is going down. He needs to lock up and get home.

_Are you somehow forgetting the passed-out kid on the floor?_

Merlin winces. He’s pretty sure he’s still in shock, or denial, or something, and he’s loathe to leave Mordred on the floor when he doesn’t even know how long the sleeping spell will last, but he’s not exactly overburdened with options.

Normally he would actually walk the three or four steps to lock the doors the old-fashioned way, make a show of it on the off chance that some passerby might be paying too much attention. But he’s too rattled for that now, so it’s with a careless flick of his fingers and a flash of gold in his eyes that the locks click into place.

He doesn’t even stop to count the money in the till; it can wait until tomorrow, and besides, anyone who tries breaking into this particular shop will very much wish they hadn’t.

That done, Merlin heads for the door in the back of the shop. Stairs behind it lead up to a reasonably sized flat; he takes them two at a time. His hands tremble as he reaches the upstairs door, making him fumble with the key, and after a few seconds of fruitless frustration he gives up and uses magic again.

The raven is waiting for him when he gets inside.

Merlin lets out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.

“Hey,” he greets, and gets a croak in response.

Merlin’s stomach is growling, but he’d been running late as it was and there’s no time to make anything now. It’ll have to wait. He needs to write this down before—

He looks out of the window again and cringes. _Damn._

Not in two thousand years has Merlin managed to lose the habit of picking up after everyone’s messes but his own. The flat exists in a perpetual state of what he’s dubbed “comfortably chaotic”, but even if the world turned upside-down and he was seized with a sudden urge to clean it all, bits of scrap paper and writing instruments would still be strewn everywhere. The way he lives kind of requires it; he still rates the invention of the Post-It as one of the greatest innovations of the twentieth century.

He’s pulling an electric blue one off the refrigerator and reaching for a pen even before he’s managed to get his shoes off. The raven watches it all from its perch on the back of the sofa, its blue eyes calm.

Merlin spares it a smile as he bends over the countertop and uncaps the pen.

And hesitates.

How in the hell is he supposed to put what just happened into a single blue square?

The fast-sinking sun leaves no time for deliberation. Merlin bites his lip and scribbles out:

_Are you sitting down? Sit down. Mordred came into the shop today. Yes, I’m sure, and no, I don’t know what it means or if it even means anything. I sort of_ —Here he hesitates, making a face at the paper. But there’s no good way to say it, so: _I sort of knocked him out. Didn’t know what else to do._

He’s running out of room on the note. Merlin grumbles and peels another one off the pad.

_I’m not sure when he’ll wake up, so don’t do anything stupid. We need to think this through._

Merlin hesitates, but he ends up writing ‘ _see you in the morning’_ instead of _‘love you’_. No need to incite panic with unsolicited displays of affection.

_God forbid_ , he thinks dryly, capping the pen. He sticks the notes together and puts them smack in the middle of the counter where the recipient can’t possibly manage to miss them.

Sighing, he walks over to the raven. A familiar itch niggles at the back of his mind, warning: it won’t be long now. He runs two fingers along the bird’s head. It nips carefully at the offending digits and he pulls them back, grinning despite himself.

“Fine, fine. Just—look, just don’t go berserk on me when you read it, all right?”

The raven’s eyes narrow the slightest bit, enough to let Merlin know he’s been heard.

And it’s just as well, because a full-body shudder hits him, knocking his legs out from underneath him. _Honestly_ , he thinks irritably, _you would think I’d be better at this by now_.

It’s his last coherent thought. Merlin’s vision blurs as the raven’s shape does the same, growing, remaking itself.


	2. Chapter 2

.

_Arthur does not wake. His breathing is easier, his heartbeat strong, but he doesn’t speak, and he doesn’t wake._

_Merlin tries to keep calm by remembering that wounded men need as much sleep as they can get; it was one of the first things Gaius ever taught him, and surely all of the rules don’t change just because someone was stabbed with a dragon-forged blade instead of a normal one. Surely._

_He drags his king away from Avalon and back into the woods. He doesn’t know when his oath to the Sidhe will take effect, exactly, and he isn’t interested in finding out what will happen if he breaks it, even accidentally._

_Little is left of their rations—there was no chance of Merlin leaving Arthur alone and defenseless, even for a short hunt—but Merlin starts another fire and settles them both down as comfortably as he can._

_And then he waits._

_He waits through the night, staying awake, keeping the fire going, checking Arthur’s breathing more often than he’ll ever admit. Unpleasant as they are, the Sidhe have never outright broken their word. Merlin reminds himself of this at least once an hour._

_But when the sun begins to dip towards the horizon again, Merlin begins, against his own better judgment, to panic._

_What if they really had been lying? What if he’s been tricked? It wouldn’t be the first time, after all—Kilgharrah, Morgana, Edwin and his remedies, Julius with his quest for the dragon’s egg, even Gwen when she’d been bespelled. Merlin has come to the conclusion that perhaps he’d be better off forswearing trust altogether._

**_You never trusted Mordred, and that didn’t help either, did it?_ ** _a nasty little voice in his mind points out. Merlin shoves it viciously away. Thinking about Mordred doesn’t lend itself well to staying calm._

_As the sky darkens he finally gives up and stands. He’s going to do—something, maybe look around and find some herbs that he missed yesterday, something that might help._

_He’s halfway out of their makeshift campsite when he hears Arthur’s voice, little more than a croak._

_“Merlin?”_

_Merlin is kneeling at his side in a breath, reaching for his hand, worry and relief combined making it hard to breathe. Arthur’s eyes are open and fixed on him, but there’s something there, something—_

_“Something’s wrong,” Merlin says out loud._

_Arthur doesn’t seem to have the wherewithal to tell him off about being annoyingly vague and unhelpful, which is just another indication that he’s right. Something is very wrong, and the way Arthur’s eyes roll back in his head not a second later is the final confirmation._

_“Arthur,” Merlin urges, panic rising like bile in his throat. “Come on—Arthur, you can’t sleep now—”_

_Arthur groans, or at least he tries to, but it comes out sounding like a croak again. He’s shuddering. Barely thinking, Merlin presses two hands to his breastplate, breathes the first spell that comes to mind for healing, and—nothing. Nothing happens._

_And then everything does._

_At first Merlin thinks it’s just the growing dark interfering with his vision, or the firelight playing tricks, or the lack of sleep—anything—and he digs his knuckles into his eyes to try and rub the illusion away. Because Arthur is blurring in front of him like he’s drifting in and out of the world and that is impossible._

_The image doesn’t go away. Merlin blinks hard, wincing as Arthur’s fingers dig into his arm and then slacken, and then—_

_It happens so fast. One instant he’s looking at his friend and his king and the next, he sees nothing but empty armor lying in the dirt._

_Everything has gone quiet._

_Stunned by the abrupt stillness, Merlin leans in to get a closer look. Something pokes out of the metal, he realizes—it’s a bird, a raven, its feathers gleaming in the dim light from the flames._

_Feeling sick, Merlin reaches for it._

_The raven jolts upright at the first brush of skin against its feathers, crowing in indignation, warning._

_Its eyes are blue, and suddenly Merlin knows what’s just happened. Knows it with a sick, bone-deep certainty. Knows it just as he knows he has failed._

.

Mordred comes back to consciousness in fits and starts, his vision still fuzzy as he blinks and tries to remember why he’s on the floor.

Then it hits him and he sits up with a jolt. Which, if the pain in the back of his head is any indication, was not one of his better ideas.

_What the hell was **that**?_

He tries to calm down by taking stock. He’s not tied up or gagged or anything weird like that, so either his kidnappers are incompetent or he hasn’t been kidnapped at all. The shop is dim, the sky he can see through the window is dark, and there doesn’t seem to be anyone around.

So what, he just…lost control of his limbs like he hasn’t since he was two, somehow knocked himself out? Even in his head it sounds stupid.

He remembers an angry voice. He remembers the skinny man with the blue eyes.

He remembers the way they’d gone gold in his fading vision.

There’s a sound in his peripheral hearing, a lock being turned, followed by footsteps on stairs. Mordred stands, heart pounding, and tries vainly to see something—anything—in the oppressive dark.

 _Okay, this is fine. Everything is fine. You have—_ He looks around in a faint panic and thinks he can sort of see the outline of the book pile Big Ears was carrying earlier. _Books! You have books. Books are heavy. You can work with this._

There’s a shadow in a doorframe at the back of the shop.

Heart in throat, Mordred reaches out and grabs a weighty book off the pile just as the lights come on, temporarily blinding him. He swings the book as the footsteps come nearer, letting out a yell.

Not that it helps. The person catches his clumsy swing, wrapping strong fingers around his wrist and tightening their grip until he drops the book with a wince.

“So it was you,” the person says quietly. It’s a male voice. Mordred blinks hard and forces his eyes all the way open.

It’s a blond man, blue-eyed and tight-lipped. In another situation Mordred thinks he might be offended by how pissed everyone seems to be with his presence.

But the man does look like he’s capable of killing Mordred and making certain the body is never found, so Mordred goes for what he does best, which is to lie like a rug.

“Look,” he says, trying for calm. “I don’t know what your problem is, but my mum is going to call the cops on me if I come home late again, so—”

“I’m not _kidnapping_ you,” the man interrupts, dropping Mordred’s wrist like a hot iron. Mordred also notices that he sounds genuinely indignant at the thought, which is really just offensive to Mordred’s intelligence.

“What part of this _doesn’t_ read as kidnapping to you?” he demands. “You drug me, knock me out, lock me up in your creepy-as-hell shop, and then bluster in all intimidating—am I supposed to be getting warm feelings from all this? Seriously?”

The man opens his mouth like he’s going to argue, then stops. His frown deepens. Mordred is seized by a mad urge to warn him that his face’ll get stuck like that if he keeps glaring at everything like it’s done him some personal wrong.

“Drugged. Right,” he says. “I can see where that may have gotten confusing.”

Mordred bristles, but the man isn’t finished. “We—that is, there’s a phone behind the desk if you need to call home. Let your mother know you haven’t been, ah…kidnapped.”

He still seems put out about the accusation. _It’s his own fault_ , Mordred thinks mulishly. _Him and Big Ears. Going around knocking people out and then…_

Well, there’s that, and then there’s the reasonable little voice saying he can grumble all he wants inside of his own head, it’s not going to change what he saw before he passed out. It’s not going to change the way his heart seemed to jump in his chest—not from fear, either.

He remembers thinking, _thank you_.

Thank you to whatever higher power or mysterious force it is that has finally tipped luck in his favor. Thank you to whatever twist of fate that might’ve sent him someone who can actually _help_.

Someone, it occurs to him, who’s been absent since he woke up.

“Where’d Big Ears go?” he blurts before he can think about it. “You know, with the…” He moves his hands in a way that’s supposed to convey ‘bizarre wearing of neckerchief’ but probably looks like he’s trying to throttle himself.

But the blond man, to his credit, seems to know immediately whom Mordred’s talking about. His mouth twitches; Mordred recognizes the look from many a boring school function over the years, an expression seen when someone knows they’re about to start laughing at a seriously inappropriate time.

“Merlin is…out,” he answers.

Mordred figures rolling his eyes and potentially pissing the guy off isn’t a smart move, but it’s a close call. As it is, skepticism still drips off his next words. “Merlin. His name’s _Merlin_.”

Blondie raises a single eloquent eyebrow. “You really want to go there, _Mordred_?”

And fine, okay, maybe he walked into that one with his eyes wide open. Mordred starts to protest—the old standby about his mum being an ex-hippie with a seemingly endless line of Welsh ancestry behind her, honestly, he was doomed from birth—but something stops him short.

“I didn’t tell you my name,” he says slowly.

The other man blinks and shrugs it off. “No, but you did tell Merlin, and he passed it on. Satisfied?”

Mordred doesn’t remember that particular exchange, but then he’s been having a really bizarre day, so one more weird thing on top of all the others doesn’t matter much. He goes back to his earlier point.

“Do you know when he’ll be back? I need to talk to him.”

The glare comes back, killing any leftover trace of amusement. “Really.”

That tone doesn’t exactly fill Mordred with confidence, but he presses on. “Look, I know it sounds weird, but I need his help. I think he’s—” _Watch it_ , he warns himself. _Thin ice_. “I think he could help me with something, that’s all,” he finishes lamely.

Blondie stares at him. “Will wonders never cease,” he says dryly, more to himself than to Mordred. Then, “He’ll be gone most of the night. You’re going to have to come back in the morning. Come on, I’ll get the phone and you can call—”

Panic rises in his throat, sudden and choking. “I can't.”

A pause. “What do you mean ‘can’t’?”

“I—” It’s hard to swallow, and his throat makes a clicking sound when he tries it. “I can’t go home.”

The blond man’s attention is fully focused on him again. Mordred finds himself wanting to look away.

“How long has it been since you’ve been home?”

Mordred shrugs uncomfortably. “Not long. Day or two, but—I can’t go back. Not right now.”

Blondie hesitates, awkward. “If you’re worried about your mother being angry—”

“It’s not that.”

He tries again. “Is there anyone else I can call?”

Mordred shakes his head, hard enough he fancies he can feel something rattle. He knows it makes him look like a little kid, but he can’t—he _can’t_. Not now.

Not ever, maybe, if this whole grasping-at-big-eared-straws thing doesn’t work out.

The thought kind of makes him want to throw up and cry at the same time, and some of that must bleed onto his face because Blondie sighs and suddenly looks a lot less threatening.

“There’s some armchairs in the room behind those shelves there, you see them?” Mordred nods. “It’s dusty, but it won’t kill you. You can sleep here tonight.” He gives Mordred a serious look. “Mordred. I can’t promise anything else.”

Relief drowns any protest he might’ve made. “I understand. And thanks for…” He coughs. “Well. Just. Thanks.”

Blondie gives him the oddest look, but he nods and turns away, toward the door in the back of the shop. Out of some badly timed fit of curiosity Mordred calls after him.

“Hey.”

The blond man turns. “I’m not going to tuck you in,” he warns.

“Oh, shut up,” Mordred grumbles. “I wanted to know what your name was. Git.”

He hesitates again, just long enough for Mordred to wonder if he’s pushed his luck up and over a cliff. But then:

“It’s Arthur.”

By the time Mordred’s formulated an appropriately scathing response about shitty, mythologically-informed names and casting stones in glass houses, Arthur’s scaled the stairs and is out of sight.

.

_He’s still mired in panic when he breaks his oath to the Sidhe, not three days after making it._

_Or at least he tries to._

_It’s only after a good half an hour spent tearing himself in two with worry over whether he can leave Ar—the bird, leave the bird alone, whether it’s still sick in this form. Finally he cradles it gingerly in his neckerchief and holds it to him, a small warm weight, and tears through the woods with terrified rage clawing its way up his throat._

_“You lied!” Merlin shouts into the woods like a madman. “You lied to me!”_

_He’s going back to Avalon, promises be damned, because the Sidhe have broken theirs. Merlin asked for Arthur’s life, and—_

_He’d asked for his life._

_Merlin trips over a root and nearly brains himself on a tree and barely notices any of it._

_He had asked for Arthur’s life, and given the heartbeat going steady and strong under his hands, the Sidhe have given it. But it had never occurred to Merlin to ask for the preservation of his form._

_His human form._

_Merlin tastes bile. He starts running, trying to find his way back to Avalon’s shores. It seems to be taking forever and a day to reach the lake, and it’s not until he sees the same damn gnarled tree for the third time in an hour that Merlin understands._

_He swore. He swore on his oath and on his own blood that he would leave Avalon be, and Avalon itself has ensured that he cannot break that promise._

_On a whim, he tries to “see” the path as he’s been able to in the past. Nothing reveals itself. The lake is hidden from him. Merlin knows, with a sinking sense of finality, that not even his magic can help him find it now._

_He sags against the tree and stares, numb, at the bird in his arms._

_The raven’s eyes are blue._

**_Well, of course. They are Arthur’s, after all._ **

_And somehow that makes it sink in when nothing else has, the realization that Morgana had managed to defeat them after all. Arthur might not be dead, but he is trapped, and he has less than no chance of ruling like this._

_Merlin at least has the presence of mind to realize that his breathing is getting quick and harsh and his vision fuzzy; he’s a trained physician, he recognizes a panic attack when it’s happening. He sits down slowly._

_“We’re going to work this out,” he hears himself say. The words are quiet and shaky and don’t sound nearly as confident as he’d like them to be. The raven seems to think the same, if the warning nip it gives Merlin’s fingers is any indication._

_But maybe it isn’t. Maybe he’s just reading into things, ascribing meaning to the meaningless motions of an animal. Maybe he really is just holding a raven._

_Maybe Arthur is lost to him after all._

_He shakes his head viciously. No. That’s still an ‘if’ that doesn’t bear contemplation. Arthur is the king who will usher in Camelot’s golden age, and Merlin is Emrys, and Kilgharrah and everyone else seems to think that means something. This isn’t the way their story ends, Merlin is sure of it._

_It can’t be._

.

Arthur makes it as far as the door of their flat before his mind flatlines. He finds himself standing with arm outstretched, fingers inches from the doorknob, and abruptly unable to move.

Which should concern him more than it does, he thinks.

He lets the hand drop limply to his side and continues to stare at the wood grain.

_Well, that was surreal._

Mordred’s face is burnt into the backs of his eyes. Fierce, adrenaline-driven bravery followed by deep suspicion, followed by the appearance of a sardonic little shit. Nothing of rage and nothing of murder or murderous intent.

He’s just a boy. He’s a child who’s most likely never held a sword in his life, and yet Arthur swears he’d felt something burning all the same. A scar stretched across his abdomen—ancient now, but it had never fully healed.

Arthur closes his eyes, pinches the bridge of his nose. Tries to take slow breaths. Notes, with some dry and distant amusement, that this is possibly what a panic attack feels like.

There’s no point in trying to avoid Merlin for long, and since he’s managed to work out the whole movement thing again, Arthur doesn’t really have an excuse. He reaches out again and lets himself into the flat, bracing himself for the inevitable.

An almost palpable sense of disapproval fills the air when he shuts the door, emanating (naturally) from the sleek black shape sprawled over the couch. Bright blue eyes dart up at the sound of movement and Arthur swears he can see exasperation in them.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he warns.

The dog huffs in a way that manages to convey the likelihood of that happening. Which is to say, nil.

He sighs and plops down onto the sofa, the dog giving an irritated grumble but still moving over to accommodate him.

“You couldn’t expect me to just leave him down there,” Arthur points out. “You can’t tell me something like that and not assume I’m going to do…something stupid.” He smiles a bit, remembering the wording from Merlin’s note.

The dog grumbles again, but he doesn’t slink off when Arthur puts a hand behind his ears, which means he’s forgiven. Until Merlin regains full use of his vocal functions, anyway.

There’s work to be done in the shop, and probably orders to fill out if Merlin was too busy panicking to get them done, but Arthur makes no move to do either. Merlin’s breathing is steady beside him and he wants nothing more than to close his eyes for a while. But the merry-go-round of thoughts in his head won’t let him. He keeps seeing Mordred’s face—this boy he doesn’t know at all, the young man who saved his life and called him brother.

The man who put a sword through his chest and smiled.

“Should I be angry?” he murmurs into the silence. The dog looks up at him steadily, like he understands exactly what Arthur means. He elaborates anyway. “If that boy really is Mordred, am I supposed to hate him for it? Or should I be asking his forgiveness?”

Merlin growls.

“You can’t deny there would be cause,” Arthur says.

But the thing is, if Merlin had voice to deny it, he would, over and over until his voice withered away to nothing. It’s a point on which they’ve never managed to see eye to eye. As it has been with many of those Arthur called family once, those who then betrayed him— Morgana, Agravaine, Mordred. A cascading line of failures for which Arthur still holds himself accountable. Merlin has never laid the blame for them at Arthur’s feet, and Arthur would be bitterly curious to know exactly where he does lay it. He has a feeling he knows.

They’ve always been partial to self-blame, the pair of them. It’s made for a lot of circular arguments.

The dog nudges his hand carefully. Arthur dredges up a smile for him; they’ve worked out methods of communication as best they can, and at this point the little gestures can almost serve as well as words. Almost.

“What are we going to do?” he asks.

It’s a completely rhetorical question, of course. Even if Merlin could answer, Arthur knows, the resulting silence would be the same.


	3. Chapter 3

.

_The hardest part is realizing that they can’t go back to Camelot._

_It’s not a choice he makes, as he’s stuck making choices for both of them. They stay in the woods, Merlin shoving at the Sidhe’s magic with everything he can think of. The problem is that the curse is not a blunt wall to be crumbled with brute force and sheer power; Merlin’s always had an easier time with that sort of instinctive magic. But this is a labyrinth, constantly shifting, moving, changing shape. Even with the finesse he’s gained over years of practice, Merlin can’t pin down a weak spot to exploit. It’s seamless._

_And it’s smothering them both._

_Still, he tries. Days and then weeks. He doesn’t sleep and he barely eats and he casts spells until he can’t keep his eyes open any longer, completely drained from the effort. Incantations and wordless prods of magic, it all amounts to the same thing. But he keeps trying. He tries not to wonder what Gaius and Gwen and the others must be thinking, whether they’ve given up by now; tries not to listen to the horrifically loud silence._

_Once, he would’ve happily cast a spell on Arthur to keep him quiet for a few hours. Now Merlin thinks an obnoxious remark about his incompetence might be the nicest thing he’s ever heard._

_The raven says nothing of the kind. It says nothing at all. It doesn’t even try to fly away. Merlin wonders helplessly if Arthur is still in there, watching impatiently or maybe trying to communicate, or if the Sidhe have robbed him of his friend completely._

_But no, he reminds himself over and over, they promised his life. And so they go._

_Trying is hard; he knows this. Turns out giving up is so much harder._

_The storm breaks with the last of his last-ditch efforts. Merlin gathers all of his strength, all of his magic and flings it at the curse out of sheer frustration and fury, a wordless, strangled yell tearing its way out of his throat._

_Something in the wall of magic wavers. His vision whites out and for a second, one endless, frozen second, he wonders if he’s done it._

_Then the raven begins to shriek._

_It flaps its wings wildly, haphazardly, like it has no idea how to use them but it’s desperate enough to try anyway. Like it wants to get away. All the while letting out those piercing, pained shrieks._

_Merlin’s still woozy from the failed attempt and has no idea what he’s done, can only hold his hands out in a gesture of surrender, of peace._

_“I’m sorry,” he says, and tries not to sound like he’s panicking. “Arthur? I’m sorry. Are you all right?”_

_The raven clearly doesn’t relax, but at least it stops making those horrible noises._

_“I’m sorry,” he says again. “I won’t—I won’t do it again.”_

_Slowly, cautiously, the raven stops trying to leave the ground. Merlin imagines it’s giving him a suspicious look._

_It occurs to him that he’s going to have nothing else to go on, now. He’s going to be forever interpreting birdlike gestures and hoping they mean something, anything that hints his friend is still in there somewhere. Somewhere Merlin might be able to reach._

_Tears spring to his eyes and he turns away, rubs them away before the raven can see. He’s exhausted, he tells himself, sniffing angrily. He’ll get some sleep tonight, and then tomorrow…_

_Tomorrow doesn’t bear thinking about. Even as he tries to make himself comfortable on the forest floor Merlin is acutely aware that what he needs isn’t sleep. It’s a fucking miracle._

_._

_That night, he dreams._

_It’s odd. He knows he’s sleeping deeply, stress finally overwhelmed by not getting more than an hour or two every other night. Normally he only dreams when sleep is fitful. But this barely even makes the list of strange things that have happened lately, so dream-Merlin decides to just go along with it._

_Everything is dark at first, and then all of a sudden he’s dreaming of a beach. The sand is warm under his hands, turquoise waves brushing against the shoreline, and a breeze ruffles through his hair. It reminds him of the beach at Gedref where Anhora had set two goblets between him and Arthur and told them to choose._

_Arthur had been willing to sacrifice his life without a second thought, to save his people and right a wrong, and Merlin thinks that might have been when he realized he no longer stayed by the prince’s side out of obligation._

_He wanted to be there. He still wants to._

_“What are you doing here?”_

_The voice is Arthur’s, which is how Merlin knows he’s dreaming._

_Not that the knowledge keeps him from looking up so fast he nearly cracks his neck, like he’s afraid Arthur might vanish again before he manages to set eyes on him._

_But he hasn’t disappeared. He’s standing there, armor-clad, hale and healthy as Merlin’s ever seen him._

_“What am **I** doing here?” he repeats, forcing his tongue to work. Even if it is imaginary, it’s the only conversation he’s had in weeks. “It’s my dream, you prat, shouldn’t I be asking you that? Not everything is about you, you know.”_

_Arthur looks unimpressed with his argument. It’s so familiar that Merlin sort of wants to cry. “Well, I am the one who’s somehow been magicked into a bird, so you’ll forgive me if I’m a little preoccupied right now.”_

_The levity of the moment seeps out as if through a sieve. Merlin turns away, fixes his gaze on the sea._

_“I’m sorry,” he croaks._

_Arthur sits down next to him. “For what?”_

_“For not getting there in time. For not—” It’s hard to speak around the lump in his throat. “For not being by your side like I should have been. I should’ve been there. I should’ve stopped Mordred.”_

_To his credit, Arthur doesn’t say anything inane like ‘there was nothing you could have done’, because he knows better now. Merlin’s abysmal skill with a sword would have been a negligible detail against a trained knight, even Mordred with his magic. Merlin had always been the more powerful of the two and both of them had known it._

_And yet here they are. Mordred is dead, and Arthur lives, and Merlin doesn’t feel the slightest bit victorious._

_“You never trusted him, did you?” Arthur asks at last. Merlin shakes his head. “Why?”_

_“It’s a long story.”_

_Arthur glances meaningfully at their surroundings. “I have nowhere else to be.”_

_Merlin huffs a laugh that doesn’t sound much like one even to his own ears, but he complies. He tells Arthur everything—the prophecy, the druid boy, and everything afterward. Aside from the occasional outburst as more lies are untangled (“Wait, dragon? What dragon? You’re friends with a **dragon**?”), Arthur listens in silence._

_Merlin’s throat feels ragged by the time he finishes. “Maybe it was all my fault. Maybe if I hadn’t pushed him away…”_

_Maybe, maybe, maybe. Maybe if he’d accepted Mordred instead of mistrusting him. Maybe if he’d offered his hand to Morgana instead of using it to poison her. Maybe if he’d told Arthur the truth that first year, when they’d already saved each other’s lives a dozen times over. If, and if, and if._

_Maybe if he’d let Mordred die when he was still a child and no threat, as Kilgharrah had wanted him to, then none of this would have happened._

_“As long as we’re casting blame,” Arthur says after a moment, “I could mention that my executing the woman he loved didn’t exactly endear Mordred to me.”_

_Bitterness edges his tone. Belatedly Merlin remembers that while he had turned against Mordred from the outset, Arthur had embraced him, knighted him, loved him as a brother. Another betrayal from someone he’d considered as close to him as kin._

_“It wasn’t your fault,” he insists. “He knew Kara forced your hand and he blamed you anyway. That wasn’t anything you could control. Mordred was a—a bad seed.”_

_“Maybe,” Arthur acknowledges, quiet. “But then if that’s the case—if Mordred really was going to turn against me no matter what I did—then there’s no point in you blaming yourself either.”_

_“That’s—” Completely different, he wants to say, but Arthur’s pointed look stops him._

_He lets the sentence lapse into silence instead, and knows Arthur takes it for acceptance._

_Time goes by as it does in dreams. At some point Arthur speaks again._

_“There’s no fixing it, is there?”_

_Merlin answers immediately, with more confidence than he feels. “Of course there is. There’s no such thing as a spell that can’t be undone.”_

_“I suppose you would know more about that than I would. But…” Arthur hesitates. “I’ve had spells put on me before. They changed the way I saw things. Everything felt…fuzzy. Like I was behind a sheet of glass that’d got fogged up, or something, and if I could just break the glass then everything would go back to normal._

_“This feels different. It feels solid. As if nothing exists outside of it. I barely even know who I am while I’m awake, and there’s nothing to…” Arthur makes a frustrated gesture. “There’s nothing to hold onto. There’s nothing to break because it’s not an illusion, it’s—”_

_“Reality,” Merlin finishes, and feels sick. From the stricken look on Arthur’s face, he’s not doing much better._

_Fortunately Merlin’s long since grown used to forcing worry down. “It doesn’t matter. Whatever it is they’ve done to you, I’ll fix it. I swear.”_

_“I believe you,” Arthur says. It’s stupid that such a simple thing can make Merlin feel ten stone lighter, but it does._

_Then, the other shoe: “But how long could that take? I’m not doubting your skills, assuming you’re better with magic than you are with anything else—” He looks at Merlin out of the corner of his eye, gauging how well the joke goes over, and seeing it fall flat goes completely serious. “But I’m not a fool. You’ve thrown everything you have at this, haven’t you?”_

_Merlin wishes he could lie, but he can’t. Not anymore. So he nods, tight-lipped, and hates himself for it._

_Arthur lets out a breath. “That’s what I thought. So say you’re right, say there is some other way out there—how long will it be before we find it? How do we know it even exists? What if I really am stuck like this?”_

_Merlin opens his mouth again to protest, but Arthur holds up a hand and he bites it back. “I can’t just think about myself. Camelot can’t have a king who’s unable to rule, certainly not now. Things are unstable as it is.”_

_“Better than no king at all,” Merlin says fiercely, but Arthur gives him a wry smile._

_“But far worse than a competent queen. I gave Gaius my signet ring. I told him to give it to Gwen; I imagine she’s been officially crowned by now.”_

_Merlin feels like he’s just been kicked in the stomach. By a horse. He tries to picture Gwen, sweet, down-to-earth Gwen, sitting on a throne by herself. Competent, certainly—more like brilliant; she’s always ruled like she was born to it, and Merlin has no doubt that she will make an incredible queen in her own right._

_But for her to have been crowned, that means that they believe Arthur to be dead. They have already begun to move on._

_As if reading his thoughts, Arthur’s mouth twists. “The king is dead. Long live the queen.”_

_“Don’t say that,” Merlin snaps. “You’re alive. You’re here, right now.”_

_“And useless,” Arthur retorts. “I can’t ask the kingdom to be put on hold while we search for some cure that may or may not exist, and I can’t—I can’t do that to Gwen either. She deserves better than that.”_

_His voice cracks. Merlin looks away._

_“What are you saying?”_

_When Arthur looks up again, there is no evidence that his resolve had ever wavered. Merlin meets his eyes and they are utterly, horribly resigned._

_“I’m saying that they all believe me dead,” Arthur says. “I’m saying…so be it.”_

.

All things considered, it’s one of the weirder nights Mordred’s had in his life.

Ancient as the bookshop’s central heating probably is, it’s been unseasonably warm lately, so he’s in no danger of freezing to death in the night. Probably. And, well, he _may_ have nicked a bit more than a chocolate bar from the old man’s shop, so he’ll be all right for food for awhile. A few days of empty calories won’t kill him.

The same can’t be said for lung infections or something, no matter what Arthur’d said, because Mordred’s pretty sure the dust is piled an inch thick on everything back here. He figures he’s been relegated to some kind of half-arsed storage room, old books piled haphazardly on the floor and a few beaten down shelves. And then there’s the hideous armchairs themselves.

Mordred, after eyeing them both with the appropriate levels of suspicion, decides on the one that doesn’t have half its stuffing coming out and curls up in it. It’s not exactly comfortable, and the Mordred of a week ago would’ve complained, but after the last few nights…well. He can now say with perfect honesty that he’s slept in worse places.

 _Guess I should probably be thanking you for this one,_ he thinks at Providence or whatever might be listening. _The whole not-getting-murdered-by-the-crazy-shopkeeper thing was definitely a plus._

Of course, there’s still the question of what the crazy shopkeeper _did_ try to do to him.

Mordred’s still trying to edge his way around that, because he really hates looking gift horses in the mouth and this room-and-board thing, even if it’s only for the night, seems like the biggest horse he’s ever going to see in his life.

But more than that, he hates lying to himself. It’s the reason he’s here in the first place, scrunched up on a stranger’s dusty chair instead of in bed at home, and it’s the reason he can’t forget the way Big Ears’ eyes had glowed in his panic.

Just remembering it starts up a flurry in Mordred’s stomach. Uncomfortable but sort of thrilled all at once. Like jumping off the high dive for the first time. He knows something big and inevitable is going to happen, and he’s walking right into it with eyes wide open. It’s exciting. It’s also terrifying.

 _And it’s a damn sight better than the alternative_ , he reminds himself, suppressing a shiver at the memory of what that alternative looked like.

_You got lucky. You won’t be that lucky twice._

Glass shards embedded deep in plaster, when they so easily could have ended up embedded someplace else. How is he supposed to live with himself knowing he can do _that_?

 _Sleep first, figure the rest of it out later_ , says the reasonable little voice in the back of his mind. Mordred has long been under the impression that he’d strangled it at some point, probably in those nasty eleven-to-thirteen years, but seeing where that’s landed him, he’s trying to do a better job of listening to it.

Besides, he can’t remember the last time he got a decent night’s sleep. His magic hasn’t felt so pissed at him since the world blew up in his bedroom, so maybe he actually stands a chance tonight.

 _Thanks to Arthur letting you stay here_ , the voice reminds him pointedly. Mordred groans. Another thing he’s going to have to work out tomorrow. For now, though…

He sort of half-remembers reading someplace that falling asleep in under five minutes is a sign of sleep deprivation.

Mordred wonders what it says that he blacks out the second his eyes are closed.

.

Merlin sleeps like shit, which in some ways is worse than not sleeping at all. He actually lets out a piteous groan when the transformation gets a hold of his insides and starts twisting, because it means the sun’s come up and he’s probably gotten ten minutes of uninterrupted sleep.

He drags himself into a sitting position when it’s over, groaning again as he works the kinks out of his back. Honestly, they _have_ a bed. If Merlin had known he’d end up sleeping on the sofa five nights out of seven, he’d’ve bought one that wasn’t so lumpy.

The raven is perched on the arm of the sofa. It croaks irritably at the noise.

Merlin snorts as he wraps himself in a blanket. “Am I interrupting your beauty sleep, Your Highness?” Some things never change.

The bird makes a disgruntled noise before closing its eyes again. Merlin strokes down its feathers, a good-morning for the modern bird, before getting up to brew some tea. He has a feeling he’s going to need the caffeine. Especially since he hadn’t gotten around to those order forms last night, which is going to mean hours of frantic digging through the back room and _shit_ , why does he do this to himself?

He’s sipping the tea before he notices the two red Post-Its stuck to the mug, one informing him dryly that the forms have been filled, and the other reminding him _why_ he’d been too distracted to do them himself:

_He wants to talk to you._

Merlin subsequently inhales half his mug, scalding his mouth and throat all the way down.

“ _Fuck_ ,” he says with feeling. Arthur peers at him in alarm.

Merlin cringes. His eyes are watering. “I’m fine, it’s fine, go back to sleep.”

Sleep. No wonder he hadn’t managed to get any; he’d been worrying about the traitor sleeping under their roof.

And, oh, _right_.

He rounds on Arthur. “What is _wrong_ with you? Honestly, I ask you to avoid one person on the bloody planet and you make that the _one person_ you’ve willingly interacted with in years!”

His tirade is thoroughly and infuriatingly ignored. As usual, Arthur is showing less concern for his own life than he would if they happened on a kitten stuck in a tree. Somehow Merlin had imagined that would change after Arthur realized just how much work certain people (ahem) put into keeping him alive, but no. Of course not. He’d been a fool to even consider it.

Merlin lets out a long breath. He doesn’t have enough caffeine in his system to deal with shouting into the void right now.

When he does speak again it’s calmer, and while he’d like to think that’s because he’s an Adult and therefore capable of remaining composed under very trying circumstances, he has the sinking feeling he just sounds defeated. “Could you at least warn me the next time you’re about to do something unbelievably stupid? I realize that will hardly leave time for you to do anything else, but still.”

The raven abruptly lifts its wings and crosses the short distance to land on Merlin’s shoulder. He decides to take it as an apology.

And then it dips its beak into Merlin’s tea. Because, as Merlin reluctantly reflects, time may erase everything from shacks to civilizations, but it’s never managed to make a dent in the fact that Arthur is a monumental prat.

There are some other details scribbled on the note in Arthur’s hilariously awful scrawl, something about Mordred sleeping in the back room and not being able to go home. None of which sheds any real light on the bizarre situation they’ve found themselves in.

Merlin downs the rest of his tea. As usual, it looks like he’s going to be the one stuck cleaning up this mess.

.

He has to talk himself into entering the shop.

Logically Merlin is aware of the reasons he _needs_ to enter the shop. Opening hours began five minutes ago, for one. And while they might have a substantial (some might say ridiculous) amount of money stashed away that’s been accumulating interest for a very, very long time, Merlin still rather likes having a job, something to keep his hands and his mind busy. Which he won’t have if he loses his clientele by being too jittery to _open the damn door_.

 _Like ripping off a plaster_ , he tells himself, and subsequently opens the door with enough force that it slams into the wall behind it.

Somewhere in the shop, something crashes spectacularly to the floor. Merlin closes his eyes and hopes it isn’t something Arthur recently repaired, else he’s likely to wake up with a nest built on his head.

 _Right_ , _let’s get this over with_. No point in trying to ignore the Mordred in the room.

He squares his shoulders and walks right past the door he ought to be unlocking, making his way to the back room entrance.

And then he stands there like an idiot.

It shouldn’t be this hard, he tells himself furiously as the seconds tick by; it _should not be this hard_ to walk through a doorway and have a conversation with a teenage boy. Particularly when one is (technically) several thousand years old and (ostensibly) the Most Powerful Sorcerer Ever to Walk the Earth.

It shouldn’t be this hard to face ages’ worth of ghosts and nightmares. Not when he’s finally got a chance to dispel them once and for all.

He steps over the threshold.

At first he doesn’t see anything but dust motes drifting in the beams of sunlight, making him wonder if Mordred climbed through a window in the night. Wouldn’t that make everything easier.

But then a lump of jacket stirs on one of the armchairs. Mordred is sleeping, then. It feels rather anticlimactic.

Merlin’s not really feeling the urge to get any closer to the boy than he already is (that is, as far away as the small room will allow), so after squinting to make sure Mordred’s eyes are really closed, he magicks the jacket away with a jerk of his chin. It slumps on the floor and has absolutely no effect on the sleeping individual.

The desire to give up, open shop and pretend nothing unusual is happening is getting more insistent by the second. Merlin shoves the instinct away, takes a few steps forward and steels himself— _he’s only a boy, he can’t hurt either of you this time_ —before shaking Mordred’s shoulder.

Mordred wakes up so abruptly he nearly flings himself out of the chair. The sight would probably be hilarious at any other time.

“You,” he croaks. Then, with a visible attempt to pull himself together, “You sure you didn’t kidnap me? Because you have a real axe-murderer face on right now. Not sure if you knew.”

“I gather you wanted to talk to me,” Merlin says stiffly.

“That’s it? I’m not going to get an explanation for any of this?”

In another situation Merlin would grant that this is a reasonable concern to have, but seeing as it’s Mordred he’s speaking to, he thinks he can make an exception where reason is concerned. “I’m already late to open, so if you aren’t going to tell me what you want then I’d appreciate you getting the hell out of my shop.”

Mordred’s eyes widen. “You knocked me out! It’s not like I suddenly decided to take a nap on your floor!”

Which…is true, and also neither here nor there. “Fine. We can talk after closing, but you need to stay where you are until then.”

“Wait,” Mordred blurts as he starts to leave. “I did—I do want to talk to you, yeah.”

And so they come to the crux of it. Trying to ignore the knot of dread twisting in his stomach, the dryness of his mouth, Merlin says, “And?”

“I need something from you,” Mordred says, every word sounding like it’s being dragged out of him with iron hooks. “Only I’m pretty sure you won’t want to give it to me.”

_Well, this just keeps getting more and more bizarre._

“You don’t even know who I am. What could you possibly want from me?” Merlin demands.

Mordred visibly swallows. “Your help.”

Merlin stares at him.

“My—what exactly do you think I can help you with?”

Mordred hasn’t moved, but he’s breathing hard, eyes almost feverishly bright.

“I guess it’s probably easier if I show you, yeah? Where do you want those?” he asks, nodding toward a massive stack of books propped up in a corner.

It’s such a non sequitur that Merlin has to parse it over a few times to figure out what the hell he’s talking about. And then to be annoyed over it.

“What’s that got to do with anything?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “Look, some of us actually need to work for a living.”

“You didn’t answer me,” Mordred says. His voice has taken on an odd edge. “Where do you want them?”

Merlin gives in. “I was going to keep them in that box over there, all right? Are you finished?”

Mordred lets out an absolutely humorless laugh. “Yeah.”

The books leave the ground so quickly Merlin barely has time to register it, whizzing by one by one and slamming into the box he’d pointed out. In the time it takes to follow the objects’ path, the time it takes for Merlin to separate this from every other odd thing he’s seen floating in his lifetime and go _wait, shit, that wasn’t me_ , the gold is bleeding from Mordred’s eyes.

Distantly he notes that a pin, if dropped at this very moment, would be deafening.

“That,” says Mordred, “is what I need your help with.”

Merlin knocks him out with magic again.


	4. Chapter 4

.

Arthur wakes up with no less than five Post-Its stuck to him. His first awake thought is that managing that in his bird form must have been a feat, which can mean only one of two things.

One would be that Merlin got bored at some point in the afternoon and started experimenting.

The other—and rather more likely, Arthur thinks, realizing the dog’s been whining in the back of his throat since Arthur opened his eyes—is that Merlin is very, very worried about something.

Arthur sits up. The notes are scattered, haphazard, with no hint as to what order they’re meant to be read in, but Arthur’s done enough puzzles in his very long lifetime to piece the message together.

The first one seems to stop the breath in his lungs:

_Mordred has magic._

Arthur closes his eyes. When he opens them the dog is nudging at his arm, obviously concerned. Arthur reaches over out of habit to scratch behind its ears.

“Honestly?” he says. “If this is some kind of joke, I think destiny is taking things a little far.”

The rest of the message is scattered worrying (‘ _he levitated a load of books by looking at them_ ’ and ‘ _I’ve got no idea how much control he has_ ’), which could have easily fit on one note, but Merlin was clearly in a hurry. He’s always made fun of Arthur’s handwriting, persistently terrible no matter how many court tutors had tried to sculpt it into something more legible, but Merlin’s own writing here is a barely readable scrawl.

Then there’s the interesting part: _He wants me to help him control it._

Arthur stares at that one. Maybe if he stares long enough it’ll start to make sense instead of just horrible, horrible irony.

Apparently guessing which part of the missive he’s read to, the dog makes a distressed sound and starts butting its head against the sofa cushions. It’s not unlike a very human warlock banging his head against a wall when he can’t figure out one problem or another, and the resemblance nearly makes Arthur smile.

“Easy,” he murmurs, resuming his ear-scratching. Merlin must be going out of his mind; he doesn’t normally allow himself to be ‘patronized’, as he puts it, for this long.

Arthur returns to the notes. The last one is just the usual mother-henning—‘ _I know I can’t stop you speaking to him because you’re a complete turniphead with no self-preservation instincts but if you could just **not** piss him off in my absence, I would appreciate it_ ’.

‘Not’ is underlined three times. Arthur gives the dog an affronted glare.

“It’s like you don’t trust me,” he says.

The dog’s eyes narrow.

.

Mordred doesn’t seem at all surprised when Arthur appears in the backroom. The boy is poking at the dusty shelves (not that that’s much of a descriptor when the entire shop is perpetually dusty, Arthur’s willing to admit), pulling out the occasional book and leafing through a few pages before replacing it.

He doesn’t appear to notice when Arthur enters the room, but neither does he react when Arthur clears his throat to announce himself.

 _Maybe some of those knightly instincts stuck after all_ , Arthur muses as the boy turns, and he finds more pride in the thought than foreboding.

Mordred doesn’t bother with pleasantries. “Did he tell you?” he asks.

“He did,” Arthur replies.

“And did you…?”

Arthur waits until it becomes apparent that Mordred has no idea how to finish that question. “I wasn’t surprised, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Mordred’s head comes up sharply. “How long have you known? About him, I mean.” He frowns. “Must’ve been awhile, because you’re taking this weirdly well.”

 _Oh, you have no idea._ “I’ve known about Merlin for a very long time. He’s about as good at keeping secrets as he is dusting.”

(He’s going to casually leave out the fact that he and Merlin had _some_ how managed to live in each other’s pockets for nearly a decade without Arthur cottoning on to the whole magic thing, which has long since ceased to be a topic associated firstly with betrayal and has instead turned into an acute and personal embarrassment. For Arthur, of course. Merlin positively delights in reminding him, when Arthur dares suggest himself capable of remembering this or that without the benefit of a Post-It: “Eight years, Arthur. _Eight years_.” It doesn’t have quite the same effect when delivered through expression rather than voice, but it stings all the same.)

Mordred is still eyeing him like he’s a pissed-off adder that could bite at any moment. “Am I going to get a reaction from you or are you going to make me keep asking stupid questions?” he says at last.

It occurs to Arthur, and not comfortably, that he’s being given something of a second chance. When Merlin had confessed his magic, Arthur had…not reacted well. And yes, a good part of that _was_ the betrayal rather than the thing itself, but still. It hadn’t been one of his prouder moments.

Problem is, he’s not exactly sure what a “good” reaction to a magic reveal is supposed to be. They don’t write handbooks for this sort of thing.

Well, being blunt has often worked for him before. “What reaction would you like?” he asks.

Mordred throws his hands up in the air, all of his considerable fourteen-year-old exasperation with adults on display. “An honest one? All I got from bloody _Merlin_ was another blackout and a splitting headache when I woke up, and please feel free to kick him in the kneecaps for that, by the way. So I’m guessing he isn’t thrilled, which is pretty damn hypocritical when you think about it, but you’re supposed to be adults so I’d really like it if you could _use your words_.”

He’s breathing heavily when he finishes. It’s at times like these Arthur wishes he could do the eyebrow acrobatics that Merlin can, but then again, Merlin learnt from the best. Uther had never used eyebrows where a well-timed growl would do.

“Are you finished?”

Mordred nods.

“Good. Well, then, my _honest_ reaction is that I don’t have one. Like I said, I’ve been with Merlin for a long time, so the idea that someone else could have the same abilities is…” He shrugs. “Less than surprising.”

“Really. That’s your opinion.”

“It is.” Arthur strives valiantly for the eyebrow raise. “Were you hoping I’d throw things?”

“Expected it, more like,” Mordred mutters. “I keep thinking people in suits are going to show up to dissect me for science, or turn me into a government weapon or something.”

“…Has it ever crossed your mind that maybe you’ve read too many science fiction novels?”

“Oh, stuff it.”

There’s an awkward little pause before Arthur clears his throat.

“What is it that you want from Merlin, exactly?”

“What _are_ you two to each other, exactly?” Mordred shoots back.

Arthur very nearly sighs—he has only vague memories of being fourteen himself, but the pieces are enough to paint a very unflattering portrait indeed—but he stays on track. “That’s none of your business. And you haven’t answered my question.”

“I told him. I wanted his help.”

“Yes, but what—”

“I want him to teach me to control it!” Mordred bursts out, and immediately looks mortified.

Arthur, however, suddenly feels a lot less confused. “I see.”

Mordred scowls. “You don’t,” he snaps. “You don’t have any idea. You don’t know what it’s like to have this—this _thing_ inside you that you can’t control, something that could hurt people if you aren’t—”

His mouth closes with a snap. Arthur finishes for him.

“If you aren’t careful.”

There’s a look on Mordred’s face that Arthur can recognize, if only with the benefit of hindsight. A hunted look. Merlin used to wear it frequently. Arthur hadn’t seen it at the time for what it was—the look of someone who was scared of themselves.

It’s never ceased to amaze him that he can trust Merlin with his life when it took Merlin so long to trust himself.

“You want him to help you learn to be careful,” he says. Mordred nods, eyes fixed on the floor.

“I thought I was going mad, the first time I saw his eyes change,” he says quietly. “I thought it was wishful thinking making me hallucinate or something. But I didn’t have anything else to go on, wondered if maybe it was fate or some shit giving me a break, and then the way he reacted to my—powers, or whatever—I knew.” He looks up again and his eyes are blazing. “I mean, that’s crazy, right? What are the odds I’d run into him?”

“Does seem a little like destiny,” Arthur agrees.

.

“Are you mad?”

Arthur has the nerve to roll his eyes. “If I haven’t gone mad by now, I don’t think I’m likely to.”

“You never know. It could still happen,” Merlin snaps. “Because I’m having a really hard time thinking of any other reason you want to keep him around.”

“Maybe because he’s a homeless boy who asked for our help?” Arthur says tersely.

“He was a little boy the last time we helped him, and look where that got us!”

Arthur stiffens. “That isn’t fair. Mordred helped us when he got older, if you’ll recall.”

“And if _you’ll_ recall, he stuck a sword in you not long after.” Merlin shoves down instinctive guilt when Arthur flinches. He’s too angry to stop—and too scared, because this is starting to feel much like it had the last time, Merlin trying to get Arthur to understand that Mordred could not be trusted and utterly, utterly failing.

That can’t happen again. They won’t get lucky twice.

“Mordred isn’t trustworthy. I tried to tell you before, and you wouldn’t hear me, and now—”

“He’s done nothing to us,” Arthur says quietly.

“He fucking _murdered_ you!”

The space around them shudders and bends as Merlin’s voice rises to a shriek. But Arthur doesn’t flinch, doesn’t take a step back. He’s never once shown fear when Merlin’s eyes have gone gold, Merlin remembers; not even on those first-last awful days. Not once.

He breaks Arthur’s gaze, feeling guilty and helpless all over again, and sits down heavily.

“I’m sorry,” he croaks. “I didn’t mean to…”

Arthur sits down next to him, and Merlin knows he’s been forgiven already.

“I’m still here, you know,” he points out. “Maybe they did try to kill me—Mordred and Morgana both—but they didn’t succeed. You stopped them.”

“By cursing us both?” Merlin replies sardonically.

There’s a heavy pause. Then Arthur says, carefully neutral, “Would you rather not have…?”

Merlin bristles. “There is _nothing_ I would not have done to keep you alive. Nothing. If the Sidhe would have accepted my life for yours, I would have given it.” Now that Arthur’s looking him in the eye again, Merlin allows himself a rueful little smile. “And I have to rate being a dog half the time as an improvement over being dead.”

Arthur cracks a smile. “A very intimidating dog,” he says, in the most patronizing tone possible, of course. “Surely a dog to make all enemies freeze in their tracks.”

Merlin wishes he could smack him. “You’re a bird, Arthur, you don’t get to make fun of me. At least I’d be somewhat useful in a fight, what are you going to do? Peck the assailant’s eyes out?”

“I might,” Arthur replies with immense dignity.

Merlin raises an eyebrow. Arthur’s mouth twitches.

He’s not sure who starts laughing first, only that neither of them can stop for a while.

But he is starting to feel the strain of maintaining the illusion, can feel blackness creeping in around the edges of his vision. It’s not smart to try and hold it for this long.

Arthur notices when he sobers. “Our time is up?”

“Nearly,” Merlin admits. He sighs. “I don’t know what to say to you, Arthur. I can’t trust Mordred. Not after what he did. Maybe you can, but every time I look at his face I see—”

He cuts himself off, but he thinks Arthur gets the picture. No matter how fervently Merlin might have wished their places reversed at the time, he imagines getting stabbed couldn’t have been an enjoyable experience either.

“And I suppose I can’t blame you for that.” Arthur looks at him steadily. “But you’re forgetting that Mordred is dead, Merlin. Our Mordred, the one we knew, the one I _trusted_ , is dead. I killed him.” A crooked flash of a smile. “He didn’t have someone like you—someone who would bend the laws of nature to save his life. We both tried to kill each other at Camlann, but I was the only one who succeeded. Doesn’t that make us even?”

Merlin bites his lip. “Will you hate me if I say no, not really?” he offers. It’s only half-joking.

The look Arthur gives him is exasperated, but undeniably fond. “No.”

“Then what are we going to do with him?”

“Let him stay another night?” Arthur suggests. “Hope one of us comes to our senses?”

Merlin raises an eyebrow. He may never achieve Gaius’ level of skill with the art of eyebrow raising, but nonetheless, he’s gotten pretty good at it over the years.

Arthur grins at him. “Well, a man can dream.”

Merlin smiles back. The entire vision is blurring into darkness, wavering in and out of existence, and it’s as good a time as any to let go.

“Talk to you soon?” he manages.

“I’ll be here,” says a voice without a face. Merlin closes his eyes.

.

When he opens them, he’s sitting on the floor of their flat with his ears ringing. He feels like he’s going to collapse.

And really, it’s not far to the floor from here, so why not. His body tips sideways and Merlin lets it. The wooden slats are cool and blessedly _here_ after the dry intangibility of the meditation vision.

A beak pushes itself roughly through his hair. The raven is making concerned noises. Merlin smiles sleepily at it, raising two fingers to stroke its head.

“’M fine,” he insists. “Just overdid it a bit, that’s all.”

The raven pecks his fingers as if to rebuke him for being an idiot. Merlin grins at the familiarity of the gesture before remembering the conversation that prompts it. He sighs.

“Suppose I should let our resident psychotic traitor know he’s got a roof for another night, shouldn’t I?”

Arthur pecks him again, harder that time. Merlin pulls his fingers back with a wince.

“Fine, fine. If you insist on not calling a spade what it is, I’ll think of something else.”

He hauls himself up off the floor carefully, monitoring himself for any sudden sharp pains. The meditations drain his strength and his power; he’s never figured out how far he can push his luck before they begin to drain other, more vital things, and he’d rather not find out.

It’s going to be some time, he realizes with a sinking feeling, before he can safely do it again.

The raven is fluttering back and forth by the time Merlin gets to his feet, a not-quite-flying motion that he knows to interpret as impatience.

“I’m going, I’m going,” Merlin tells it. “Honestly, it’s like you forget I’m not your servant anymore.”

Which is probably less true than he’d like it to be some days, but oh well.

He makes sure to lock the door behind him before he descends the narrow staircase. He can feel the adrenaline beginning to pump already—he can’t help it; the feeling became part and parcel of dealing with Mordred long before he showed any actual inclination towards stabbing people. Even knowing that this Mordred is a child with no apparent swordsmanship to speak of doesn’t seem to help. Some habits die hard.

“Mordred!” he calls as he walks into the shop.

The call is greeted with a _thud_ of the bodies-hitting-the-floor variety.

_Oh, damn._

Well, it wouldn’t be the first time someone’s tried to rob them, although how they got past Merlin’s particular brand of security measures is a question to be pondered later. He walks purposefully to the back of the shop, considering different spells that could take care of things subtly—

—and is faced instead with Mordred, staring up at him from the floor and looking stunned.

“Were you sleeping already?” Merlin asks, bemused. “You realize it’s not even dark yet.”

“Long day. Needed a nap,” Mordred manages. Merlin can see that he’s sweating and pale, the blood drained from his face.

“Are you all right?” he asks before he can think about it. Leftover physician training, must be. More old habits he’s never quite been able to break.

The question quickly answers itself. “I think I’m gonna be sick,” Mordred says, and as if on cue promptly turns green.

One last damnable habit kicks in. Merlin flicks his eyes to a corner where a lonely rubbish bin has been gathering dust for who knows how long, and in an instant it’s moved across the room to nudge at Mordred’s elbow. Fortunately, Mordred is too busy heaving at that point to wonder where it came from.

Merlin stands by uncomfortably as the minutes drag on. Finally he can’t take the sound of puking any longer and retreats to the front desk just to give himself something to do.

He and Arthur have long since taken to keeping bottled water behind the desk. It’s a necessity borne by a combination of omnipresent dust and a seemingly never-ending list of things that need to be repaired (the old-fashioned way, lest regular patrons start to wonder and, well, it gives Arthur something to do). He grabs one and returns to the back.

Mordred hasn’t yet gathered the wherewithal to remove himself from the floor, but at least he seems to have stopped throwing up. Wordlessly, Merlin offers him the water.

“Thanks,” Mordred mumbles as he uncaps the bottle and begins to gulp it.

“Drink too fast and you’ll be sick again,” Merlin warns him, and immediately wants to kick himself in the face.

 _Gaius would be glad you’ve remembered that much_ , he tells himself as the boy obeys and drinks more slowly. _Focus on that._

“Thanks,” Mordred repeats. He sounds marginally more like a human being now that he’s had something to drink. “I can—I’ll clean this up. Sorry about the mess.”

“You can stay overnight again, if you’ve got nowhere else to go,” Merlin says instead of acknowledging the apology. Mordred blinks.

“Thank you,” he says for the third time.

Merlin doesn’t say what he wants to say, because ‘ _stop thanking me_ ’ sounds petulant and ‘ _I’d like us to remain mutually unimpressed with each other, thank you_ ’ doesn’t make much sense even to him.

“Thank Arthur,” he advises instead, and turns to leave.

“You hate me, don’t you?”

Merlin stops. Slowly turns back around.

“That didn’t sound like a question,” he says.

“It wasn’t.”

There’s a too-familiar steel in Mordred’s tone. Merlin’s hackles rise on instinct.

“You’re awfully sure of yourself.”

Mordred shrugs. “Doesn’t take a genius to figure out that you can barely stand to look at me. I’d been wondering why that was.”

“And you aren’t wondering anymore?” Merlin asks, nonplussed.

“I don’t need to stay here, you know,” Mordred says sharply. “I could find somewhere else to sleep if I had to. It’d probably be a lot more restful than being up half the night wondering if you’re going to strangle me in my sleep.”

Merlin glares. “Then why don’t you?”

“I told you,” Mordred snaps. “I need your help. Even if you don’t want to give it to me.”

Merlin folds his arms and says, very calmly, “Is that a threat?”

Mordred rolls his eyes. “What is this, the mob? Christ. I meant I could do something for you. Barter, or something—”

“What did you mean before?” Merlin interrupts. “It sounded like you’d figured something out. I’m all ears.”

“Yeah, I noticed that,” Mordred says under his breath. Merlin magnanimously ignores the crack. “I heard you and Arthur talking, all right? Didn’t mean to eavesdrop or anything, just…things got sort of loud, so it was pretty hard to miss.”

“You’re lying,” Merlin says flatly. “You didn’t overhear anything. Tell me the truth.”

“I—“ Mordred looks up at him helplessly. Merlin is jolted by the memory of a much younger boy with those same blue eyes, begging him for help. It’s an entirely new level of déjà vu.

“Look, I didn’t mean to, okay? I just fell asleep and…” He makes a vague hand gesture.

“That doesn’t actually tell me anything.”

“I saw you two together, talking! What’s it matter how I saw?”

“You’re lying,” Merlin repeats. “That’s impossible.”

“ _What’s_ impossible?”

 _You can’t have seen us together because we haven’t been human at the same time in about two thousand years._ Even for someone who has magic himself, that would be a bit of a stretch.

He takes a calming breath before speaking again. “You know what? I don’t know what you’re playing at and I don’t care. Keep your secrets. You can stay the night, like I said, do—whatever it is you’ve been doing down here—”

“Homework,” Mordred mumbles.

Merlin blinks. “Right. That. And tomorrow you can leave. Go home, go elsewhere—like I said. I really don’t care.”

He turns and leaves Mordred on the floor and almost, _almost_ makes it to the stairs before the boy’s voice stops him.

“It was a dream or something, I don’t know. I was tired and I fell asleep and the next thing I knew, you and Arthur were talking to each other. I only caught bits. Everything was…blurry. And there was a beach.”

Merlin stands frozen with one hand over the doorknob. _That’s…improbable_ , he thinks, trying to be calm.

Improbable. But not impossible, which puts it one step ahead of Mordred’s first explanation.

“Am I crazy?” Mordred asks in a strained little voice.

Merlin makes a split-second decision.

He only spares a moment to think, _this is an incredibly stupid thing to do,_ before turning on his heel _._

“If you want my help, then you listen to what I say and you do it. I don’t have time to babysit someone who’s not going to hear a word that comes out of my mouth.”

Mordred gapes, but he pulls himself together quickly and nods.

“And I’m assuming you don’t have another job lined up—” Honestly, whatever part of him is supposedly a Responsible Adult feels like Merlin ought to be asking about school and just when was the last time Mordred _went_ , but the rest of him isn’t about to get mired any deeper in the boy’s life than he absolutely must. “—so you can help out here. This place is a mess, and I’ve been meaning to hire someone to help with it anyway, so…” He makes an awkward hand gesture of his own. Mordred is still staring at him like he’s convinced he’s wandered into a very bizarre dream.

_Which is apparently not as unlikely as one might think._

“I’m going upstairs now,” Merlin says at length.

Mordred nods some more.

“Right.” And on that awkward note he turns and walks very purposefully up the stairs, like he can leave his latest horrible decision behind if he just moves quickly enough that it can’t catch up to him.

He thinks he hears a quiet “thank you” being lobbed at his back, but he pretends not to hear it.

.

Of course then there are a few problems.

One: Merlin has effectively banished himself from his own shop because he can’t stand to be around Mordred longer than strictly necessary. It’s a Sunday so they’re closed anyway, but still, this is not a tenable position.

Two: He has invited the aforementioned bane of his existence to stay. He has agreed to educate the bane of his existence. He is going to have the bane of his existence _sleeping under his roof, good god, what has he done?_

Three, and perhaps the most intimidating: He is now going to have to explain this to Arthur. Ideally in such a way that it will sound less batshit insane than it does from his current perspective.

Luckily Arthur is either asleep or causing trouble elsewhere, as he hadn’t flown at Merlin’s head the second he stepped through the door in a demand to know what had happened, so that gives him a little time. He kicks off his shoes, starts boiling water for the purpose of making some desperately needed tea, and curls up on the sofa with a pen and a full pad of Post-Its.

He has no idea where to start.

 _I have no idea where to start_ , he writes, figuring with a mental shrug that honesty is the best policy. _I told Mordred he could stay the night and then things sort of spiraled out of control, so now he’s staying indefinitely. I’m sorry, I should’ve talked that over with you first._

Not that Arthur will mind, he thinks ruefully, as he’s apparently taken to seeing Mordred as an abandoned kitten in need of rescue.

But that train of thought just takes him back to the little boy Arthur had been unable to keep from helping, and how all of that had ended, so Merlin gets off of it. It won’t do him any good now; he’s dug his grave and now he’s damn well going to have to lie in it.

_Let me just sort this out first thing—I still don’t trust him. I still don’t want him around, especially around you and most especially with magic. But he mentioned something today that made me worry, and_

Merlin stops. Because this is the bit he’s having trouble explaining even to himself.

Mordred had heard him and Arthur inside of the dreamscape. There’s no other explanation for it. He can’t know how much he heard, but it doesn’t matter, because if a sleeping Mordred is capable of simply wandering into Merlin’s dream-construct, if it’s so easy for him that he almost believes it to be a normal dream…

Keep your enemies close. Merlin knows he didn’t manage that very well in the old days, but better late than never, he supposes. A teenage warlock with that kind of power, particularly one with Mordred’s history, is too dangerous to be let off a leash.

He ends up writing, _I don’t want him to be a danger to himself or others. I don’t need that on my conscience. And stop gloating, I can already tell you’re gloating._

He sticks the notes together, leaves them in a conspicuous place, and fires up his laptop. If he’s somehow managed to end up in self-imposed exile from his own shop, he might as well get some orders done.

.

For the record, Mordred hadn’t meant to eavesdrop. If you could call it that. He hadn’t meant to wander off in his sleep, is what he means.

It’s never happened before—the feeling of falling asleep and half-waking up in an endless black space, devoid of shape or feeling or anything, really, except for two angry voices.

He’d thought, _okay, this is a dream, I’ve had stranger ones_ , and followed the sound because why not? It’d seemed better than wandering aimlessly around in the dark.

The voices had belonged to Merlin and Arthur, which made sense, because they’re the only human beings he’s had any real contact with these last few days. And they’d been arguing. Mordred had heard his own name.

The whole thing had felt disturbingly real. Off. Like Mordred hadn’t actually been dreaming, just sort of…sleeping awake.

He’d wandered closer to the voices, straining to make out the words. At some point he’d ended up on a beach. Sand and sea and wind in his hair. It had felt nice.

And then…

For the record, Mordred also doesn’t make a habit of throwing up on strange people’s floors. Or anybody’s floors, really. But extraordinary circumstances and all.

It becomes clear after an hour or so that Merlin really isn’t coming back. Which is odd, because the place is a damn mess and Mordred imagines there’s work to be done even if they are closed.

Then he remembers that Merlin didn’t actually deny hating his guts, that even though he agreed to be Mordred’s mentor or whatever it doesn’t mean he wants to spend a second longer than necessary in Mordred’s presence, and feels depressed all over again.

It’s another hour of staring at the same page in his Literature textbook and not taking any of it in before Mordred gives up and sets it aside. He’s been trying to keep up with school as best he can, considering he’s not actually been going (someone would be bound to tell his mum); reading ahead in his textbooks and texting friends for assignment outlines and generally trying to keep himself occupied. It’s pretty boring staying cooped up with nothing but page after page of dryer-than-dust academia, but even that’s better than being alone with his own thoughts.

His head is a real bastard, Mordred knows that by now.

But apparently his tolerance for Yeats has long since evaporated, so Mordred decides to make good on his promise by cleaning up…something.

 _Probably anything would do_ , he thinks dubiously, looking around the room.

Merlin will most likely eviscerate him if Mordred tries to put the books someplace without knowing the system behind it, so he awkwardly digs some tissues out of his backpack and starts dusting off shelves.

 _So this is what you’ve decided to do with your life_ , he muses. _Work a thankless, miserably dusty job for the privilege of being taught by a man who can’t stand the sight of you. Brilliant, Mordred. Really, well done._

_Well, it’s better than being a murderer._

The thought’s like a sucker punch, and it leaves Mordred swallowing down bile again. Which is disgusting. He’s going to have to find out where Merlin keeps that water stash.

Anyone else would think he’s gone mad, he knows, putting so much stock in what for all intents and purposes had been a dream. But Mordred’s been alive fourteen years. He knows nightmares. He’s had all the usual ones about showing up to school naked or all of his teeth falling out. Normal stuff, all right?

But he’s also had the _dreams_.

He knows the difference, and he knows that when things feel real enough, it’d be stupid not to put any stock in them.

He’d been small when they started, maybe too small to remember when. The earliest ones had just been flashes of things he couldn’t make sense of, but that were still enough to send him flying out of bed in a cold sweat to crawl into bed with his mum.

Eventually he’d gotten too old to do that anymore. Mordred’s outgrown a lot of things, but he’s never quite managed to outgrow the dreams.

There’s no structure to them, not really, although they’re clearer now than they had been when he was a little kid. The recurring themes go something like this:

_Young, very young, still old enough to know something’s terribly wrong, but there’s a kind man looking after him, he’ll make sure everything is all right—but he can’t because he dies, they put him down like he’s an animal and want to do the same to him—_

_Older, keeping secrets, always keeping secrets, but there are two pairs of blue eyes; one is bright and strong and full of hope; one is cold and angry and powerful and somehow still scared. One trusts him, one hates him, and he doesn’t understand either—_

_Younger, betrayal, the powerful eyes just starting to go cold, and he swears not to forget this, not to forget any of it—_

_Older, and there’s something—there’s someone, two someones, a man and a woman and he cares for them more than anything in the world, but the two are enemies, both want the other dead and he can’t—he doesn’t know—_

_A woman, always a woman, green eyes and ice in her smile, warm only when she looks at Mordred—_

_A woman, always a woman, brown eyes and fierceness filling them to overflowing, a noose around her neck—_

_Something snaps in his head and he screams—_

_One of the people he loves is dead, and he slides a sword deep into the gut of the other, and it feels—it feels like—_

_It’s not triumph, but he’s smiling._

_A stab of pain followed by spreading numbness, like icy water poured all over; it feels like an end, and he wonders if it’s raining—_

_Darkness—_

Mordred slaps himself across the face. Not hard, just enough of a sting to snap himself out of it.

 _That isn’t right_ , he tells himself, trying futilely to calm his roiling insides. _They don’t come like that, not all at once_. And it’s true. It’s taken him years to piece together enough snippets of sensation and blurry images to form something even sort of coherent.

Somehow, though, there was never room for doubt.

_He fucking murdered you!_

Mordred has just enough time to think _oh, fucking hell_ before he’s on his knees again, clutching at the sides of that damned trash bin as he pukes up whatever’s left in his guts.

He can’t stop shaking.

At first he hadn’t thought anything of the dream in the darkness-turned-beach, not when it was a change from blood and lightning and whatever else his mind liked to come up with to screw with him, but Merlin had said those words and suddenly a lot of things had slid sickeningly into place. Like why his eyes are always so cold. Or why, every time Mordred looks at either of them, he feels a sort of twinge in his gut. Like he’s done something wrong and isn’t sure whether he’s about to be caught.

Merlin does hate him. Or some version of him, anyway, and the worst part is that he actually has a good reason.

Merlin had called him a murderer.

Something about that must’ve been a shock to his system, because he’d catapulted awake, sweating and shaking and desperately nauseous. And somehow he’d managed to fall on the floor as well. Panic really does not agree with him.

Merlin himself appearing had just been the icing on the cake. Mordred hadn’t been planning on saying anything. He’d figured he could lie his way out of it like he does with everything else.

He hadn’t known it was real until he’d seen that look on Merlin’s face.

_How do you feel guilty about something you don’t remember doing?_

_You shouldn’t fucking have to!_

Mordred knows he’s getting angry again, knows he shouldn’t be, knows what a horrible idea that is, but he can’t seem to calm down. Everything has gone mad. Like he didn’t have enough shit going on, now this is being dumped on top of it? What higher deity has he pissed off lately? Why the _fuck_ is this happening to him?

He feels it the instant he loses control, which is of course too late. Half the books around him fly from their shelves and rocket across the room. Instinct forces him to duck, so he only hears the spectacular cacophony of a dozen volumes slamming into a wall at high speed before thudding to the floor.

Ringing silence.

Slowly Mordred sits up again. His hands are shaking.

_No. Please, no. This can’t be happening again._

He hadn’t meant to do it.

But that’s the problem, isn’t it? He hadn’t meant to do it the last time, either. He never _means_ to. But it happens anyway, so then what the hell does it matter what his intentions are?

Mordred can feel his breath coming sharp and fast. He puts his head between his hands, squeezes his eyes shut and tries to remember how to breathe.

.

He’s always been a little different from the others. There were the dreams, of course, but every kid has nightmares, and Mordred’s got really good at writing them off over the years. Just really persistent nightmares. That’s all.

But then there’d been the magic, obviously, and he couldn’t write that off as anything but real. Or crazy, but of the two, the first was slightly less terrifying. He’d shoved it down deep and tried to ignore it.

Magic, he’s learned, doesn’t take kindly to being ignored.

It started to itch underneath his skin, a constant tingle just shy of being painful. Like Mordred imagined an animal might feel when fitted with a collar just a bit too small. Like his own abilities were punishing him for clamping down and refusing to let them out.

Suffocating them.

He started to get into trouble. Acting out, just regular kid stuff at first—being a little shit in class, then skipping class in favor of wandering around and doing nothing in particular. He just needed to move. If he didn’t, he felt like he was going to go mad.

His mum worried. Of course she did; what else was she supposed to do when her only son stopped talking to her and started turning into a delinquent?

(That was what all the school letters said—‘delinquent’, and that was even before he started stealing sweets from checkouts just to see if he could get away with it. The adrenaline was almost enough to drown out the itch, sometimes.)

His personal record ended up being a week of skipped school, just short of the tally needed for expulsion, and the worst part was he didn’t even care. Mordred had always liked school. He’d been _good_ at it. But somewhere along the way he’d turned into a jittery ball of raw nerves, throwing anything he could at the beast nipping at his heels in the hope that it might be distracted, at least long enough for him to get away. His grades had just been the latest thing to be thrown, but it was really bloody hard to keep running when the beast was already inside you, setting you on fire from the inside out.

Well, and then he just got unlucky. The school phoned his mum and she couldn’t ignore the issue anymore, or hope that Mordred would get whatever this was out of his system and get himself back on track. He’d skidded so far off the rails he didn’t even know where they were anymore.

She’d ended up staying home that day, the better to rip Mordred a new one the second he walked through the door.

The ensuing lecture was one for the ages, and she said a lot of things Mordred knows now that she didn’t mean. Most pointedly that she didn’t want him to become useless like his long-gone father, which was such a cliché Mordred probably would’ve laughed had he been watching a sitcom and not, you know, living it.

Eventually she’d stormed out with tears in her eyes and Mordred had stood there, stock still, staring a hole in the wall.

He hadn’t said a word the whole time. Not once.

Silently, slowly, he’d gone into his bedroom and shut the door. Sat on his bed and stared numbly at the wall.

And immediately remembered why he’d been trying so hard not to sit still lately—it made it too easy to _think_.

It was like all the shouting had put cracks in the walls he’d built in his head, and now the knowledge that he’d fucked up spectacularly was flooding in. He’d fucked up with school and he’d fucked up with his mum and he’d fucked up with…whatever the hell was wreaking havoc on his insides, this thing he couldn’t control.

He’d tried to levitate bread over to the toaster once. The toaster had exploded, fucking _exploded_. Which was hilarious for about five minutes, before he’d realized—

The same thing he was realizing all over again, actually.

He was a fuckup. Worse, he was dangerous.

Things started getting fuzzy after that, his breathing getting heavy, laborious, like the room was closing in around him. He felt like something was clawing at his skin from within and he was furious, all of a sudden, because why did this have to happen to him? It wasn’t enough to be the weird kid with no dad who had weird dreams and weird eyes that turned yellow sometimes when he forgot himself; he had to have this massive, angry blob of ability he had no idea how to control—why? Why’d he have to get _that_ on top of everything else?

Something had snapped. Mordred had seen red and then—

The world had exploded.

At least, that’s what it’d felt like. The windows of his room had all shattered at once, glass flying everywhere; books and knickknacks went shooting off his shelves, his desk, slamming into the walls with such force some of them actually left dents in the drywall.

He didn’t realize until the room had settled that he’d been screaming. Maybe he’d just been trying to ease the tension somehow, let out some of the stress that’d been building up for months on end with no relief, but it had turned into something else.

Mordred had looked over to the side, dread pooling in his stomach.

The wall opposite the window had been turned into some sort of twisted modern arts project, shards of glass sticking out everywhere, blue paint nicked off in six places. A football participation trophy he’d got when he was six years old had sunk into the wall as well, three inches deep by the look of it.

As he’d sat there in stunned silence, his first thought had been, _Good thing Mum wasn’t in here._

His second, and more pertinent, had been _And what if she had been?_

It had moved pretty quickly from there. He’d panicked, bolted—hadn’t even snagged a sandwich or a change of clothes, just grabbed his school bag, launched himself off the bed and gone wherever his feet had wanted to take him.

.

A croaking noise from the corner nearly startles Mordred out of his own skin. Jolted out of his breathing exercises, he looks up sharply.

A raven is perched on top of one of the bookshelves, and it seems to be looking at him.

Mordred blinks a few times to make sure he isn’t hallucinating—at this point he’s probably going mad anyway so it doesn’t really matter, but it’s the principle of the thing—but the raven remains stubbornly present.

“I’m not Edgar Allen Poe, you know,” he says shakily. “So you’re gonna need to take that cliché somewhere else.”

The raven tilts its head but otherwise doesn’t move. Mordred sighs.

“All right then, what the hell. Do what you like. I’m probably crazy anyway.”

There’s no discernible response. Which is as it should be, because birds don’t talk and teenagers don’t kill people. At the very least not without _remembering_ it.

Tears spring to his eyes with alarming speed. “Shit,” Mordred mumbles, reaching up to wipe them away, but they just keep coming. “ _Shit_.”

He tries to tell himself, as the tears ratchet up into racking sobs, that he’s not losing any face here. There’s no one around. Just a stupid bird that can’t talk. But he’s pissed anyway because he knows he looks like a little kid, crying because he just threw up and now his throat and nose are burning and he can’t breathe without smelling it.

He’s not. He’s crying because he hasn’t been home or seen his mother in three days, hasn’t slept well in weeks. He’s crying because kneeling on a stranger’s dusty floor throwing up in a cardboard box has somehow become the _least_ depressing part of his day.

But mostly, Mordred knows bitterly, he’s crying because he’s scared.

He’s scared of his magic. He’s scared of his dreams and he’s scared of Merlin and he’s scared of himself. He’s scared because he knows fuck-all about things like magic and reincarnation and he’s bloody _terrified_ that he’s actually going crazy.

_I’m not going crazy. I’m not crazy. I’m just—_

_Just what? What the hell am I, then?_

He can’t cry forever, though. Eventually the sobs taper off into sniffles; Mordred registers in a vague kind of way that he is even grosser now than he had been a few minutes ago. And even before that he’d been pretty gross. When’s the last time he took a shower?

“Shit,” he repeats into the silence. His nose is all stuffed up, though, so it comes out more like “Shid.” Which is somehow hilarious, so he says it again. “Shid.” He starts laughing. He laughs until his stomach starts hurting again, and when he thinks _wow, I really am cracking up_ , it’s only a little bitter.

There’s a fluttering on the edge of his peripheral vision, followed by a slight weight on his shoulder and the feeling of tiny pinpricks digging through the material of his shirt. Tilting his head sideways, Mordred can see the raven perched on his shoulder like he’s a character out of Dungeons and Dragons or something.

“H’llo,” he greets it, because it feels like the right thing to do.

The raven starts preening him in response, running its beak repeatedly through Mordred’s hair.

“I’m pretty gross right now,” he warns it. The bird doesn’t stop. “Fine, whatever.” Maybe his rat’s nest of hair has confused it. Maybe it thinks Mordred is a lost little…baby raven, whatever those are called.

 _Not too far off, then_ , he thinks reluctantly, reaching up to stroke between the bird’s feathers without thinking about it. Surprisingly—or maybe not—it lets him without putting up a fuss.

The whole thing is trippy as hell, but also surprisingly therapeutic.

.

Merlin’s never really surprised when Arthur vanishes from their flat. They both learned the hard way that the ex-king tended to go batshit if cooped up inside for too long—something that carried over from his human self, it would seem—so Merlin’s always careful to leave a window cracked open.

Of course this has backfired on a few occasions, the most memorable being when Arthur had transformed mid-argument with a frustrated, growling Merlin and still been so pissed that he’d flown off and picked a fight with the first sentient thing he’d encountered. That being one of the Tower ravens.

“Uppity bastards,” Arthur had grumbled once he was human again, cuts and scratches and all. “I used to _rule_ that land, you know.”

Turf wars aside, Merlin knows that Arthur—even Arthur in bird form—is perfectly capable of taking care of himself. He used to own to a bout of intense paranoia about letting his king out of his sight, but that had calmed after a few years.

Fine, decades. Who’s counting anyway?

So when he’s filled enough orders that his eyeballs are beginning to bleed and his lower back is cramping from bending over the computer screen for so long, looks up and sees the sun hanging low in the sky and knows Arthur’s not in residence, he’s not overly concerned. They’ve both been guilty of cutting it close on more than one occasion, but they’re always both home at sunup and sundown.

Sundown. Damn. He’d almost managed to forget who is still going to be here.

Merlin groans, stretches until he hears something give a satisfying _pop_.

 _The shop’s heating is shit_ , a reproachful little voice in the back of his mind reminds him. Merlin grimaces. It’s been warm lately so they haven’t really needed it, but then again…

He fights a brief battle with himself before giving up and getting up. There are some spare blankets shoved under the bed; those should do it. He might not want Mordred around, but he’s still a child and Arthur will give him the mother of all disappointed looks if Merlin allows the boy to contract a freak case of hypothermia whilst under their roof, so there it is.

 _I’ve gone soft_ , he thinks morosely a few minutes later, heading down the stairs with musty blankets in hand. _Soft as a marshmallow. It was always bound to happen sometime, I suppose._

He makes sure to make a lot of noise entering the shop this time around, not wanting a repeat of the earlier fiasco. “Mordred?”

“In here,” Mordred calls back, and honestly, doesn’t he ever leave that back room?

Merlin shakes his head— _not my circus, not my monkey_ —and follows the sound.

And is met with the most bizarre sight he’s seen in a very long time.

Mordred is still curled up on the floor like he never left it (there’s a very distinct scent of vomit in the air that makes Merlin lean back a little); his eyes are red and he looks an absolute mess. Merlin nearly catches himself feeling sorry for him. He can’t remember ever seeing Mordred look so pathetic. It’s…disconcerting.

Almost as disconcerting as the fact that Arthur is currently perched on his shoulder.

Mordred continues to stroke absentmindedly between his feathers, oblivious to Merlin trying not to gape in the doorframe.

“What’s going on here?” he manages at last.

“Is he your pet?” Mordred asks, which conveniently has _nothing to do_ with the question Merlin just asked. “Only, he seems to like people.”

“Not really, no,” Merlin says before he can think about it. But it’s true; Arthur isn’t unpleasant as a bird—well, no more unpleasant than he is as a person—but he certainly doesn’t go out of his way to make friends with strangers. Or with anyone. And Merlin can’t remember the last time he saw him willingly set talon on another human being.

He tries very hard to communicate _what the hell do you think you’re playing at_ to Arthur through sheer force of glare, but is thoroughly ignored. Typical.

Mordred starts to shrug before apparently realizing that would dislodge Arthur and tilting his head instead. “Well, he hasn’t pecked my eyes out or anything, so I guess I’m just special.”

There’s enough teenage snark in that tone that Merlin sort of wants to strangle him for other than the usual reasons. He inhales slowly instead, offering the blankets and a temporary truce along with them.

“Here. It can get cold down here at night.”

Mordred eyes the blankets like they’re going to bite him, but after a second reaches up and takes them anyway. “Thanks,” he says uncertainly.

Merlin nods and holds out an arm for Arthur. The raven merely eyes him.

 _Don’t be difficult, you prat_ , he thinks impatiently. _I’m tempted to skin you as it is._

With a noise almost like a sigh, the raven flies from Mordred to Merlin. The familiar weight settles on Merlin’s forearm and he lets out a breath he hadn’t meant to hold.

“Good night,” Mordred offers from the floor.

He’s pitiful. He’s so damn pitiful and _harmless_ -looking, even if Merlin does know better.

Arthur is looking at him with knowing eyes. Merlin is seized by the sudden if not unfamiliar desire to drop him, but it wouldn’t do any good. He knows he’s lost this round.

“You’re disgusting,” he informs the boy on the floor. Mordred stares.

“Yeah, I’d figured that one out myself.”

 _Don’t strangle_ , Merlin reminds himself. _You’re an adult loads of times over. Resist the impulse._ “Well, anyone would, because you reek. You need to shower before you suffocate yourself in your sleep.”

Mordred continues to watch him blankly. Merlin musters up his very best Gaius Eyebrow.

“Are you going to come with me or not?”

The boy scrambles up from the floor, Arthur makes a coughing sound that sounds too much like laughter to be comforting, and Merlin heads back upstairs feeling like he’s just been thoroughly played.


	5. Chapter 5

.

So, to recap, in the last forty-eight hours Mordred has a) shown off his abilities or whatever to a near-perfect stranger, b) learned that said stranger is under the impression Mordred’s a reincarnated murderer, c) made friends with a bird, d) somehow scrounged up gainful employment and a roof over his head in one fell swoop and e) is now following his new employer upstairs, ostensibly to take a shower because he’s disgusting, but possibly so that Merlin can murder him and hide the body with fewer potential witnesses.

It’s just been a day.

Merlin keeps glancing back over his shoulder like he doesn’t want to let Mordred out of his sight. Mordred feels like he ought to be offended by this, but quite frankly he’s too fucking tired.

_But hey, shower. Let’s just hope no one feels like reenacting ‘Psycho’, yeah?_

God, but that movie had given him nightmares. Watching Merlin stick a key in the door at the top of the stairs, Mordred sends off another quick prayer to luck: _Please do not let this end with a knife stuck in my back, because dying in the shower seems like a really undignified way to go._

Merlin shoves the door open and goes inside. After a second of hesitation—during which Mordred imagines the last of his self-preservation instincts dying horrible deaths—he follows.

“Kick your shoes off wherever, I guess,” Merlin is muttering, tossing his key on the counter. Mordred obeys and drops his bag as well, cautiously scanning his new surroundings for any sign of murderous implements.

He doesn’t see any, but then, the flat is enough of a mess that they could very well be hidden in plain sight. Clothes are strewn randomly about the floor, dusty knickknacks are dotted over every flat surface, and Mordred spots a squashy sofa that he immediately wants to collapse onto.

There are also apparently the remnants of the world’s largest piñata explosion. Bits of multicolored paper sit absolutely everywhere—the counter, the floor, the TV, everywhere Mordred looks. Upon closer inspection, a shitton of pens are laying around as well. Maybe Merlin’s a writer or something when he’s not peddling dusty books. Either that or he’s the most forgetful person Mordred’s ever met.

“Did you win a Post-It sweepstakes or something?” he asks.

Merlin ignores the question, which if he’s honest Mordred was pretty much expecting. “The shower’s straight down that hallway, second door on the left. There’s towels under the sink.”

“Right,” Mordred says, feeling suddenly awkward. “Erm. Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it,” Merlin replies. Somehow Mordred gets the feeling that he really means it when he says it.

He walks down the hallway a little too fast to be casual, but Mordred feels sacrifices have to be made in the interest of survival. Behind him, he hears Merlin say something that sounds like “Don’t make that face at me,” and wonders dismally if he’s in the residence of a legitimate crazy person.

At least the crazy person has a pretty great shower. Mordred’s aware of the stereotype that teenaged boys are totally comfortable stewing in their own filth, but he’s always called bullshit on that one. He _hates_ feeling dirty; it’s been driving him mad these past few days, enough that he’s considered nicking soap instead of chocolate from the next corner shop. At least then he’d be a hygienic thief.

He exits the shower free of any knives to the back or chest. His clothes are still disgusting, of course, and Mordred cringes the whole time he pulls them back on, but at least the rest of him is warm and clean. He also ends up requisitioning a toothbrush from under the sink to get rid of the puke taste. It’s a good feeling.

Very nearly as good as the smell of microwave pizza wafting through the door.

He’s reminded of the old cartoons wherein delicious smells, more often than not, lured unsuspecting characters to painful fates. Following the smell of empty calories back down the hallway, Mordred suddenly understands why those characters never seemed to smarten up. Food is a powerful motivator.

Merlin glances up as he reenters the room. “When was the last time you ate?” he asks suspiciously.

As if on cue, Mordred’s stomach lets loose a helpful growl.

“I had a chocolate bar this morning,” he offers, pathetically.

Merlin looks briefly torn between amusement and something more pained. He sighs and shoves the pizza across the counter.

“Just eat something before you collapse. I don’t want to have to explain the body of a teenage runaway ending up on my floor, thanks all the same.”

Mordred opts to ignore the snark in favor of inhaling a slice of pizza. Honestly, he doesn’t even remember moving across the room; apparently prolonged hunger will do that to you. It tastes amazing, even with a slightly singed crust and—

“Is this Hawaiian?”

Merlin straightens up like he’s bracing for a fight. “Yes.”

Mordred makes a face. “You realize that’s disgusting, right? Fruit doesn’t really belong on pizza, just saying.”

The raven, from its current perch atop the TV, makes what Mordred takes as an agreeable sound.

Merlin glares—first at the bird, then at Mordred, which is interesting. “You’re still eating it, aren’t you?” he says pointedly.

Mordred takes the hint and picks up another slice.

Together they polish off the food in silence, Merlin pausing only to set aside a few slices and cover them in plastic wrap. Mordred wonders if they’re for the still-absent roommate.

It’s not exactly difficult to infer that there’s a roommate. Not when every spare surface is covered in Post-Its saying things like ‘ _the milk is sour, you’ve been warned_ ’ or ‘ _if you watch How To Train Your Dragon while I’m trying to sleep one more time I swear to god, I will slit your throat with a butter knife_ ’. Not exactly the kind of notes you leave yourself, even if you are the most forgetful person of the face of the planet. It can’t be anyone but Arthur, he figures, given how he’d been wandering around the inside of Merlin’s shop in the middle of the night.

 _Then again…_ There’s one near Mordred’s elbow; he flips it around to get a better look while Merlin is refrigerating his leftovers. In big, spectacularly awful handwriting it says, _I hear all the kids are doing ‘selfies’ these days. You should master the art before I forget what you look like_.

Huh. Maybe not just roommates, then. Either way, Arthur must have some really bizarre work hours. Maybe it’s a night shift thing. Maybe he’s a nurse? He hadn’t really seemed like the bedside-manner type, but what does Mordred know?

Merlin clears his throat, breaking Mordred’s concentration. “You have what you need?” he asks, awkward. “I mean. Those blankets should do it?”

“Erm.” Mordred blinks. “I think so, yeah. It hasn’t been cold or anything, so.”

“Good. That’s…good.” Merlin nods a few times. Mordred has to wonder if he’s actually an adult.

Thinking about age as it pertains to Merlin actually makes him think of something else. “Hey, do you have any idea who owned the bookshop before you?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Just wondered.” The look on Merlin’s face tells him that’s not going to cut it. “It’s just—I used to look in the window, yeah? When I was a kid. But my mum would never let me go in, said the man who owned it was crazy.” Merlin’s eyebrows hit his hair, and Mordred scrambles to elaborate. “I mean, she didn’t _say_ crazy, she just said odd. ‘A very odd old man’, I think it was. So I just…wondered.”

Merlin’s got that pained look on his face again, like it doesn’t know which expression to make. “I guess she wouldn’t be wrong in thinking he was…odd,” he says carefully. “He was very old; you’re bound to get a little odd eventually.”

The silence that follows stretches into awkwardness extremely fast. It’s Mordred who finally puts them out of their mutual misery.

“Erm. Thanks for the pizza.”

“You’re welcome.”

“I’ll just…” He trails off and drifts over to the door, shoving his feet back into his shoes. “Good night, I guess.”

“Good night,” Merlin echoes. He only hesitated a second. Maybe that’s progress?

Probably not.

Mordred steps carefully out of the door and shuts it behind him. Then he takes the stairs two at a time and hopes Merlin can’t hear his footsteps—or his heart—pounding away like he’s just run a marathon.

_Right, so, that was really weird._

Honestly, it’s like the point of all this is to teach him a lesson or something, only he’s got _no idea_ what it is. He and Merlin have apparently come to a truce, which is weird in and of itself since the only reason they _need_ a truce is because Merlin’s got some weird metamagical ideas in his head and accidentally kidnapped Mordred to make himself feel better, so what exactly is he supposed to be getting out of this?

Mordred gets to the bottom of the stairs, through the door and all the way back to the back room no closer to an answer.

And typically, it’s only then that he manages to pull his head out of his own arse long enough to realize he’s left his backpack behind.

_Oh, shit._

He quibbles with himself for all of ten seconds before groaning, getting up and heading right back up those unforgiving stairs. Merlin had seemed pretty keen to get rid of him, but you know what, he can put up with another thirty seconds of Mordred’s presence. His phone is in that bag; his alternative is a night of mind-numbing boredom. And it’s only just getting dark.

The door to Merlin’s flat looms in front of him. Bracing himself, he knocks.

There’s no answer.

Cursing under his breath, he knocks again. “Come on, I just want my bag, all right? I’ll quit bothering you after that.” Still nothing. “Merlin?”

An unpleasant sort of sick feeling is curdling in his stomach. Because, all right, Merlin could be in the bathroom or something, but what if he’s not? What if he’s hurt, bleeding out all over that ratty sofa while Mordred’s out here shuffling his feet?

So maybe he’s gotten a little paranoid lately.

Nervously, Mordred reaches out and tries the doorknob—more out of a desire to be thorough than any real hope it’ll work—and to his astonishment finds it turning under his hand. Merlin must’ve forgotten to lock it.

He steps into the flat and—

_Is that a fucking **frying pan** coming at my head?_

Indeed it is.

It fortunately stops several inches from his face, not that that does fuck all in getting his heart rate back down.

Arthur is standing at the other end of the frying pan, looking disheveled and completely confused.

His “What the hell are you doing up here?” is completely drowned out by what Mordred thinks is his rather more pressing, “What the _fuck_ is wrong with you?”

“Me? You’re the one sneaking into people’s flats,” Arthur says tersely.

“I was invited!” Mordred half-shrieks. It’s not a very manly noise, he’s aware, but come on— _frying pan_. “I left my stuff behind, I wasn’t expecting fucking _Rapunzel_ to be—”

And, wait. Mordred frowns and stops mid-tirade. “When’d you get up here, anyway?”

For the first time in the admittedly brief interactions they’ve had, Arthur looks uncomfortable. “I was here the whole time. Sleeping. Must not have heard you come in the first time.”

“Sleeping. Right.” Honestly, is there something about being fourteen that makes all so-called adults convinced they can bullshit you with zero effort? Mordred’s almost insulted; at least when _he_ lies to people he knows they’re getting the result of years of practice. A quality product, if you will. Arthur’s lying is like a tool left too long on the shelf, rusty with disuse.

A growl comes from behind him, and Mordred jumps. A big black dog has come out of nowhere and is staring him down with ice-blue eyes. And also growling quite a bit.

Mordred really doesn’t want to be eaten by a dog. That seems like it’d be only a few steps better than ‘knifed in the shower’ in terms of undignified deaths.

“Easy,” Arthur says, and Mordred has one homicidal second of thinking it’s directed at him before he realizes Arthur is talking to the dog. He’s also lowered the frying pan. “We’re fine here. Everything is fine.”

Mordred takes issue with that summary, he really does, but his mind is hung up on the kerchief around the dog’s neck.

The miserably familiar red neckerchief.

The sick feeling in his stomach is back.

“Where’s Merlin?” he hears himself ask. “Seems weird he’s not out here, with you making a ruckus and all. Or is he sleeping too?”

“Mordred, you need to leave,” Arthur says firmly. The growling continues.

“Your dog really doesn’t like me,” Mordred remarks. It’s odd; his heart hasn’t stopped pounding away, but he sounds almost calm. “Where’d you get that—” he gestures to his neck “—for him, by the way? It’s nice. Distinctive, and all. Looks antique or something.”

“Mordred—”

“You still haven’t answered me, you know. Where’s Merlin? Is he here?” Mordred lets out a strangled little laugh. “Only, I’ve just been downstairs and back and I didn’t see him.”

Arthur’s jaw tightens. His eyes flicker to the dog; it’s brief, but it’s there.

_Oh, no._

Mordred can actually feel his brain rejecting everything he’s seeing right now because oh, no, no, _no_ , this _cannot be his life_.

A little desperately, he asks, “Did he climb out a window or something? Because I’d accept that. Like, it’s gotten to the point where I’d accept that as an explanation.”

There’s silence for what feels like a hundred years.

Very slowly, Arthur sets the frying pan down. The dog continues to growl.

Mordred thinks he actually whimpers. “Oh my god, I was wrong. I haven’t wandered into a horror movie; I’ve wandered into an acid trip.”

Arthur clears his throat. “I think we need to have a conversation,” he says.


	6. Chapter 6

.

“So let me get this straight.”

Mordred lifts his head from his hands and tries not to sound too obviously like he’s despairing of his life and everything in it.

He points at the dog. “That’s Merlin.”

Arthur looks uncomfortable. “Yes.”

“And…you’re a bird.”

“Sometimes. Er. Half the time, yes.”

Mordred hears the pleading in his own voice, which is sad. “And I’m _not_ crazy?”

“You’ve got magic,” Arthur points out. “You know Merlin does too. What’s one more crazy thing?”

Groaning, Mordred drops his head back into his hands. “You’re sure Merlin didn’t drug that pizza or something? Because drugs would definitely make a lot more sense than any of this.”

“Is it possible you missed the part about _magic_ existing?”

“No, but that’s—” Mordred makes a wild gesture meant to…oh fuck it, he flails, all right? He flails because sometimes that’s just all you can do. “That’s different, isn’t it? I’ve grown up with that, it’s always been there. This shit is like an eighties movie threw up all over my life and now I’m supposed to clean up the mess. Next I s’pose you’ll be telling me you ended up this way because a witch cursed you or some shit like that.”

Arthur gets this really shifty look on his face, and Mordred’s voice rises to a pitch he hadn’t known was possible.

“Are you _shitting_ me?”

“Technically I suppose you could say there was a witch involved, yes, but that’s beside the point—listen, I tried to get you to leave. You’re the one who insisted on poking around.”

“I’m a teenager,” Mordred moans. “Making horrible life choices is a requirement for my age group. You, on the other hand—”

Arthur raises a hand for silence, and Mordred shuts his mouth without thinking about it. “Can we just agree that this isn’t a discussion either of us wanted to have and leave it at that?”

Numbly, Mordred nods.

Another awkward silence ensues.

At least the dog has stopped growling. Although he hasn’t left Arthur’s side since they sat down to have this delightful conversation, which makes him wonder.

“Can he understand us when he’s, you know, like this?”

Arthur glances down at the dog and shrugs. “A little, I think. It’s…harder to focus, as an animal. Harder to concentrate. Processing basic words and gestures is difficult enough, never mind responding in a way that gets your point across.”

“But you’ve done it,” Mordred interrupts, remembering the oddness when Merlin had come down with the blankets. “I’ve seen you. You can communicate with each other.”

“Well enough to get by. It’s taken years of practice, though.” Arthur’s mouth quirks, but it isn’t quite a smile. “Years and years. To be honest, we didn’t do a fantastic job of communicating when we were both human.”

Recognizing from personal experience the signs of an imminent brood, Mordred changes the subject. “So how does that work, then? Is it random—like, one minute you’re minding your own business, next you’re sprouting feathers?”

Arthur shakes his head. “Goes by day and night. Sun goes down, it’s like this; sun comes up again, and it’s the opposite. Efficient, if irritating.”

 _I can imagine_ , Mordred almost says. He doesn’t, though, because…he really can’t. He can’t imagine what it must be like, being so close to someone without really being close at all. Suddenly the endless detritus of Post-Its surrounding them isn’t as amusing as it had been.

Three inches. Everything you could want to say to someone, and all of it has to fit on three inches of brightly colored paper.

Mordred’s aware that he’s starting to blink a lot, which is kind of embarrassing. He coughs.

“So you’re a pair of shapeshifters and one of you has magic, and you run a bookshop because…?”

Arthur spreads his hands in a shrug. “Why not? It’s a nice enough place, and if we keep strange hours, nobody’s surprised if the ancient book collectors are a little eccentric.”

Mordred remembers the old man again. “Guess they wouldn’t be.”

“I think you should get some rest,” Arthur says after a bit. “It’s been a long night.”

“No arguments here,” Mordred mutters. He stands up and collects his backpack, trying to ignore the feeling of two pairs of eyes boring into him the whole time.

He pauses at the door. “Arthur?”

“Yes?”

“Why’d you tell me all that?” He swallows. “I mean, this is crazy, yeah? All of it. You could’ve just laughed it off, told me I was mad and had done with it. I would’ve believed you.”

Arthur gives him a long look.

“Then maybe that’s why I told you,” he says at last.

Mordred doesn’t pretend to get what that’s supposed to mean. Crazy is crazy, just like dangerous is dangerous—it doesn’t matter what Arthur thinks of him or what Merlin does. Mordred is what he is.

It’s not really a comforting thought.

.

_He’s not sure how long it’s been since they left Camelot. Years. Decades, probably, and Merlin’s starting to think he needs to stop keeping track of the time, or it’s going to get very depressing very fast._

_Either way. They stop at an inn for the night, and the town is quiet and it seems as good a time as any to test his tolerance to alcohol._

_His tolerance, as it turns out, is terrible._

_He stumbles into their room at whatever ungodly hour and finds the raven perched on the bedpost, still awake and glaring at him. At least Merlin thinks it’s glaring; it’s kind of hard to tell, especially with the room spinning._

_Oh right, the room is spinning. He should probably sit down._

_He sits—or rather collapses—onto the bed, a stripe of moonlight filtering through the window to scatter across his legs. The raven immediately flutters over and quorks directly into his ear, as if to punish him for being an idiot. Merlin yelps and jerks away._

_“Prat,” he grumbles, rubbing the offended ear. The raven says nothing._

_It’s still unnerving, not getting any kind of response when he calls Arthur names or does something stupid. Every time Merlin thinks he’s starting to get a handle on this—this thing they have, silence will squeeze in where it’s not wanted and remind him all over again what’s been lost._

_“I still don’t know how to do this,” he says out loud. “Talking, I mean. And you’d probably say I could talk enough for three people, but that’s not what—” He stops, trying to articulate what he’s thinking. It’s all very fuzzy. “I don’t know how to talk when you’re not talking back. I don’t know what to do with that._

_“Before, you know, it was always—you drove me mad. You did, I won’t try to lie about that, but I know I drove you mad as well.” He grins, almost. “Gaius would probably call it a partnership, mutual irritation that builds character, something like that. I remember him telling me once about how some things—plants and things—they could survive all right on their own, but they did so much better when something else was, you know, helping them along. Symbiotic. That was it. I think that’s what it was like.”_

_His face feels hot, and he’s got the distinct feeling he’s making a fool out of himself (talking to the ceiling in the dark like a madman), but it’s like the dam that keeps all of his words stopped up behind his teeth has broken and now they’re all gushing out in a flood._

_“Sorry,” he says, “this is all coming out a mess. I guess what I’m trying to say is that we—we helped each other, you know? And trying to talk to you could be like talking at a stone wall sometimes, you know it was, you prat, but this is—this is worse.” He swallows hard around a sudden lump in his throat. “This is worse.”_

**_Shit_ ** _. He breaks off and puts his head in his hands, trying to breathe. Trying to remember why he’d thought this was a good idea in the first place._

_There’s a careful touch at his hair, and for one wild second he thinks, **he’s back, this has all been a god-awful dream and now I’ve woken up and everything will be fine** —but no, it’s just the bird, running its beak through his hair._

_Almost like it’s trying to give him some comfort. There’s something to that, he supposes, managing a watery smile._

_“Sorry,” he says again. It sounds half-choked and garbled, but he doesn’t imagine that makes much of a difference. “I guess it’s just—even when you were at your most stone wall-like, I still knew you could hear me. Even if you weren’t listening right then.” He takes a deep breath. “But now it’s like I’m shouting into a hole in the ground. I have no idea if you can hear me. I can’t know if you understand what I’m saying or if I’m just….”_

_Merlin trails off, looking down at his empty hands. There’s probably some metaphor there, he thinks, but if he’s going to start thinking in metaphors then he’s already done for, so he starts stroking the raven’s back to occupy his fingers with something better than empty space._

_There’s something else there, he knows. Something big hiding behind all of the words he’s just vomited everywhere. And it’s stupid that they still have secrets. It’s so stupid that he’s still hiding something from Arthur after all this time—really, the logical part of his mind insists, if Arthur didn’t turn on him for the magic and the lying and the betrayal and everything else, then knowing the last bit surely won’t be the tipping point._

_But then there’s the other part of Merlin’s mind, the part that’s panicking. Because what if it is the tipping point? What if, all that time spent hiding his magic, he’d been avoiding one precipice while a completely different cliff’s edge waited just behind his feet?_

_He barely remembers what it was like anymore, not being in love with him. It seems like such a damnably long time ago. He doesn’t know how to go back._

_All honesty, he’s not at all sure he’d want to go back if he could._

**_Even if it ruins everything we’ve built up to now?_ **

_He’s dry-swallowing. Another panic attack, then. How lovely. He squeezes his eyes shut and tries to calm down, tries to focus on the feel of sleek feathers under his touch, the breath coming next to his ear—not human breath, no, but still. Proof that he hasn’t failed, not completely, not yet._

_And maybe it’s that tiny little vote of confidence that gives him the courage—well, that and the ale. Because isn’t that why he’s so afraid? Because he still has something to lose?_

_Isn’t that a good thing?_

**_Fuck it_ ** _, he thinks. He takes a deep breath and jumps._

_“I love you, you know.”_

_The words hang, briefly, in the silence between them._

_Then he begins to babble, the last of the dam crumbled. “I mean, I say that like it’s some—some big revelation that I’ve had, but it’s not. Some days I think I’ve been in love with you from the first, which is stupid, because you were trying to take my head off and I’m pretty certain I was trying to concuss you, but even if that’s an exaggeration, it’s still about—well, how many years has it been? A lot. It’s been a lot. Which is sort of pathetic, when you think about it.”_

_He shoots the bird a halfhearted glare. “Not that you noticed. As it should’ve been, I suppose, with Gwen and all. But it is frustrating sometimes. I know you’re not an idiot all of the time, so the only explanation is that you’re being purposely obtuse.”_

_But that’s not quite right, because Arthur’s never been stupid. He’s just always been very good at not seeing the things he didn’t want to see._

_The magic, Agravaine, Morgana and Mordred—he almost wants to say something about it but he doesn’t. There are some things that can’t be unsaid or forgotten, even if they are forgiven._

_Merlin sighs. “Well, there you are. No more secrets on my end. I would say I’m sorry that it took me this long, but, well.” He shrugs. “You probably can’t understand any of this anyway, so it’s fine. I wouldn’t expect anything from you if you could. But the point is that I’m here, all right? I always have been and I always will be. Even if—even if you aren’t—”_

_He can’t finish, but he imagines the point stands anyway._

_The raven is still running its beak determinedly through his hair. Merlin manages a tired smile for it._

_“I’ll find a way to fix this,” he murmurs. And for a second, maybe he even believes it._

_._

_For once, he falls asleep easily and hopes that he doesn’t dream. The nightmares are shit and the good dreams are worse._

_He doesn’t end up having time for either._

_It feels like he’s been asleep for all of thirty seconds when something drags him back into consciousness. Merlin groans and tries to roll over._

_The grip on his shoulder tightens, shaking him until he finally opens his eyes out of sheer frustration. It’s pitch black in the room, all trace of moonlight gone._

_“What—” he begins, and then he realizes that the fingers digging into his skin are just that—fingers._

_When Merlin finally looks up, mouth open, Arthur is staring at him with wide eyes._

_Even in darkness, there’s no question of who he is._

_The moment stretches. Merlin says nothing, terrified of dispelling some fragile illusion._

_“I heard you,” Arthur says at last._

_He doesn’t disappear, and Merlin’s in no mood to start asking questions._

_He thinks Arthur might try to say something else, but talking doesn’t feel like the priority right now, so Merlin throws his metaphorical hands in the air and his caution to the metaphorical winds, pulls him close and kisses him._

_There’s a moment of stillness where Merlin thinks maybe this is nothing but a hallucination after all._

_But then Arthur is kissing him back, more carefully than Merlin would have imagined him doing, and the illusion holds. Merlin wants to stay inside of it for the rest of his life._

_He’s given seven minutes._

_It’s more than he would have expected to have, ever again, but he can still feel the tremor under Arthur’s skin when the transformation begins to pull at him, and it feels like his heart is breaking all over again._

_He panics. All he can think about is losing this, losing Arthur again, and the sheer impossibility of it. He can’t let it happen. He won’t let it._

_Magic bursts out of him like a white-hot flare, temporarily blinding; he can’t remember ever using it like this before, like it’s sucking the very marrow from his bones in exchange for the power he’s wielding. This, he thinks, is how stars die._

_And then it’s gone just as suddenly, leaving him utterly drained and exhausted. Everything hurts. His brain feels like it hurts, making it hard to think in straight lines._

_But Arthur is still there._

_He looks horrified._

_Merlin opens his mouth to ask what’s wrong, what could possibly be wrong when he’s finally done it, but nothing comes out. Strange—he must’ve fallen on the floor at some point, because Arthur’s never been taller than him. Certainly not by this much. But there’s softness under his hands, so what—?_

_His hands?_

_He looks down._

_There’s moonlight on the blankets again, enough to see by. But there are no hands where they should be; no human fingers. There are instead a dog’s slim black paws, and they twitch when Merlin flinches in shock._

_“Merlin, what the hell have you done?”_

_He can’t think. Arthur is saying something else, something he can’t understand; his mind is muddy and it must be the shock, it has to be—he’s hallucinated before and he’s doing it again, that’s all, isn’t it? The reason his thoughts keep slipping away like water through a sieve?_

_“You idiot, what did you **do**?”_

_What has he done?_

_But the animal mindset leaves no room for lying to himself, leaves no room to doubt the obvious._

_Which is that he’s fucked up royally._

_Again._

.

.

The next morning is awkward as all hell, which Mordred’s guessing he should have expected.

Merlin comes downstairs with a look on his face like he’s just been force-fed a dirty sock. It’s not a nice face. And when he sees Mordred, lurking in the doorway between the back room and the main part of the shop, there’s this painfully uncomfortable thing where they both freeze and stare at each other for what feels like millennia.

Mordred’s guessing Merlin knows more about millennia than he does, but that’s what it feels like.

Finally, Merlin unglues his feet from the floor and strides past Mordred into the back room. Mordred follows him for lack of anything better to do, and is wordlessly handed a box of books.

He waits. No instruction is forthcoming.

“Erm,” he prompts.

Merlin looks pinched. Like he really, really wants to be anywhere but right here in this moment. Mordred sympathizes; he really does.

“Do you know how the Dewey system works?” Merlin asks.

“Erm,” Mordred says again.

“…Right.”

Apparently they’re going with the ‘last night and its life-shattering revelations never actually happened’ approach, which is fine. Mordred completely approves of this approach.

He approves a little less when the next ten minutes are spent enduring a lecture—no, sorry, an _explanation_ —about completely arbitrary numbers being assigned to completely arbitrary categories. Mordred kind of wants to argue the stupidity of it all when he finds out pet books don’t go right next to the regular animal books, but Merlin _kind of_ looks like he’s had that argument enough times that he’ll tear the throat out of the next person to try him, so Mordred prudently keeps his mouth shut.

Who even owns antique books on pet care, is what he really wants to know.

“So that’s that,” Merlin is saying. “We get a ton of donations, more than you’d think, but it’s just me doing the organizing and the filing alone is a bloody nightmare, so…” He gestures helplessly at the expanse of dusty boxes surrounding them. It’s a desolate literary landscape indeed.

Mordred frowns. “Just you? Arthur doesn’t…?”

Merlin stiffens, but surprisingly doesn’t clam up. “We learned the hard way that having him squint at repetitive numbers for hours on end made him prone to bloodshed, so no.” He coughs. “He keeps the place standing, though. Has done since we got it. He’s repaired nearly everything in the building at this point.”

“Cool,” Mordred says, because he can’t think of anything else to say.

Merlin coughs again. Well, it is very dusty in here. “That should be everything you need, so I’m going to open up.”

By the time Mordred manages a “yeah”, Merlin’s already out of the room. And here they’d been so close to having an actual conversation.

Mordred looks at the dozens and dozens of old books at his feet, the dust in their pages just waiting to choke him to death.

 _You’ll have to get in line_ , he thinks, and makes a face. _I guess it’s time to go to work._

It’s a long day. Like, an interminably long day. Turns out antique bookshops don’t really get a load of traffic during weekday afternoons; who knew? Mordred gets into a groove, sorts the books out into piles that he then carries to the proper shelf. His wrists are smarting after the first hour; by the fourth, his back is starting to ache.

_And here we have Mordred, eighty-year-old man in a fourteen-year-old’s body. Witness in awe as he shelves the withered corpses of books and inhales ten lifetimes’ worth of dust without stopping._

At least his new “job” is confusing enough that it doesn’t leave much time to think.

He’s sweating and sore by the time it gets dark, so he collapses into one of those questionable armchairs and surveys his handiwork. It’s not bad, he thinks with some smugness. A lot fewer boxes are sitting around, anyway. He can almost make a path across the room without risking a concussion.

His phone buzzes, and Mordred glances at the screen, hoping it’s not his mum again. He’d texted her just the once to let her know he wasn’t dead or kidnapped or anything, not that that’d stopped her from continuing to freak out.

It’s not her, though. It’s Kathy from school texting him Ms. Fray’s latest assignment. Mordred thumbs the attachment and groans—honestly, he’d thought astronomy would be an easy science option, but he’s probably ended up doing more reading for this class than any of his English ones. This week it’s a twelve-page article on eclipses and really, does anyone think this stuff is practical?

_Well, it’s not like you’re going to be at school to turn in your work anyway._

Mordred cringes. He really hadn’t thought this through well at all, had he?

“What are you doing?”

He flinches, almost drops his phone. “ _Christ_ , Arthur.”

“You’re the one sitting in the dark,” Arthur reminds him, switching on a light. He takes a look around and nods. “I think I’m impressed. It’s considerably less of a health hazard in here.”

“Should be,” Mordred says, trying not to sound as pleased as he feels. “I’ve been at it all day. Pretty sure there are laws against that, actually.”

“I’m going to get some Indian,” Arthur offers. “Can I bribe you with curry?”

Mordred feigns outrage. “You think you can force me to work crazy hours and keep my mouth shut about it with _curry_?”

“I think you’re a teenager, which by definition means you’ll do anything for food,” Arthur replies. His mouth is twitching.

Mordred pretends to think about it for about two seconds before letting out a martyred sigh and hauling himself up off the armchair. “Might as well come along, make sure you get my order right,” he says. Arthur looks surprised, but he doesn’t protest.

It’s still unseasonably hot, although now that the sun’s gone down the temperature is back to a humane level. This humidity doesn’t bode well. Still, it feels better than expected just to be outside again, away from the dust and the lack of functioning air conditioning that characterize _Ealdor_.

“Do you two ever actually cook?” Mordred asks.

Arthur pulls a face. “Not much. I’m shit at it. Merlin…well, Merlin tries. He did make me eat rat once, though; don’t think I’ve ever quite managed to shake that.”

Mordred finds himself pulling a similar face. “He did not.”

“Hand to god, he did.” Arthur laughs. “Of course, I made him eat it too once I figured out what was going on. We ended up foisting the rest of it on—” Arthur hesitates, but it’s so quick Mordred almost doesn’t catch it. “On my sister.”

Mordred snorts. “Bet she loved you for that one.”

“She hated me for a lot of things. I don’t think rat stew rated high on the list, in hindsight.” He clears his throat. “We’re here. What did you say you wanted, again?”

They have indeed ended up in front of a small Indian place. Mordred trips over himself ordering because he’s still thinking about how depressed Arthur had sounded a minute ago. Family drama, sounds like. Well, Mordred can understand _that_.

“So, you’ve been assigned shelving duty?” Arthur asks him on the walk back. Mordred groans.

“Yeah, and talk about thankless work. If I didn’t already think Merlin hated me, I would now.”

There’s an awkward little pause. Arthur doesn’t try to lie and say Merlin doesn’t hate him—which, as depressing as it is, makes Mordred respect him a little more.

“It isn’t you,” he says at last. “It’s…complicated.”

Mordred gets that. Probably gets it more than Arthur knows; Mordred’s not sure how much of his dream-wandering Merlin told Arthur about, but whatever. He shrugs.

“Doesn’t matter. As long as he helps me with the whole…” A waggle of the fingers meant to convey ‘ _magic_ ’ without sounding bonkers to anyone who might overhear. “I don’t really care what he thinks of me.”

Arthur looks at him sidelong. He doesn’t call Mordred out on it, but Mordred gets the feeling he knows he’s full of shit.

It’s stupid. It’s really, really stupid, because he _shouldn’t_ care. He doesn’t know Merlin from Adam; why should he give a damn what Merlin thinks of him? But some part of him does care, and it’s incredibly obnoxious.

He starts when Arthur reaches over and puts a reassuring hand on his shoulder.

“He’ll come around,” he says. “He just needs time.”

“Time.” Mordred tries to sound convinced. “Right.”

_Because if a couple thousand years didn’t do it, another few days’ll definitely do the trick._

The rest of the walk is silent, though once they get back to the shop Arthur surprises him by sitting in the armchair that Mordred isn’t using.

“Were you expecting a guest?” he asks, dry as salt at Mordred’s surprised look.

 _No, just wondering why you’re bothering to eat with the enemy_. He doesn’t feel all right about being shitty right after Arthur’s just bought him food, though, so he shakes his head and leaves it at that.

They eat quietly enough until Arthur notices the book lying open near Mordred’s feet. “You realize Merlin will kill you if you get curry on one of those books, don’t you?”

Mordred rolls his eyes. “It looks about a hundred years old as is, I don’t think he’d notice if one page got a little smudged,” he protests.

“It’s older than that,” Arthur corrects him, eyeing the massive book with interest. “What are you doing reading the wares, anyway? Can’t imagine it makes for exciting pleasure reading.”

Mordred half-shrugs. “It gets boring down here; figured I might as well know what the hell I’m putting on shelves. Especially when they’re a thousand bloody pages long and like to give me back problems before I hit fifteen. Besides, look.” He leans over and flips a few pages. In all those hours of shelving, this is the only interesting thing he’s found—an anomaly tucked between the pages of a massive treatise on agricultural advancements in the eighteenth century. No wonder the original owner hadn’t found it.

Carefully, very carefully, he lifts the paper up and unfolds it. It feels like a butterfly’s wing, whisper-thin and delicate enough to fall apart if he breathes on it wrong. Mordred imagines Merlin really would kill him then.

“Says it’s a map of Camelot,” he says, passing it over to Arthur. “’Course it could just be a sheet of paper covered in tea stains, for all I know.”

“No, it’s genuine. Not old enough to have been created while Camelot actually stood, but definitely old.” Arthur smiles a bit. “I remember when we got this. It was a total fluke; I don’t think the woman who sold it to us even knew it was in that book. Merlin was thrilled.

“It’s completely inaccurate, of course. Like—here, look at this.” He points to a faint line, green ink almost completely faded away. “That forest actually expanded further than this map makes it look. It throws everything else off.” His finger moves to another point, marked simply, _Avalon_. “This, for instance. It was much closer to the center of the woods.”

Arthur seems to remember where he is and coughs. “That’s if the place existed at all, obviously. Half these points are either misnamed or invented.”

He refolds the map and hands it back to Mordred, who presses it back between the pages of the world’s most intolerably wordy book.

“Sounds familiar, though,” he says thoughtfully.

“I’m sorry?”

Mordred looks up. “Avalon. Rings a bell, doesn’t it?”

There’s something guarded about Arthur’s eyes. It hadn’t been there a second ago, and Mordred wishes he could get rid of it.

“You must have read it somewhere,” Arthur says.

“Must have,” Mordred agrees.

He pushes the niggling feeling of déjà vu into the back of his mind and resolves to leave it there.


	7. Chapter 7

.

_The second time it happens is an accident, and a year later, and Merlin probably hasn’t slept more than an hour in over a week._

_At some point his body decides to take over for the good of all and just shut down. One second he’s squinting, trying to concentrate long enough to magic up a fire, thinking in circles about Arthur and the curse like he always is now, and the next he’s nowhere._

_Everything is dark._

_For a second Merlin is righteously pissed off, wondering if the Sidhe, in all of their infinite capacity for being complete asshats, have decided to take his eyesight as punishment for trying—and failing—to break the bargain. But no, he realizes, looking down at his hands; he can still see. There’s just nothing **to** see._

_He thinks, **This is very strange.** And then, **But weirdly familiar.**_

_A curious calm has spread through him. Since he has nothing better to do, he decides to wander. There isn’t much to see. He can’t even tell that he’s moving, and normally the thought would make him more than a little bit panicky (he’s had this thing about claustrophobic spaces since Morgana trapped him in that fucking cave), but nothing can pierce the eerie calm._

_He finds the beach first, soft sand under his shoes slowly replacing the darkness. Blue sky and sea streaking through the black until he can’t remember a time when he wasn’t standing in this calm place, the taste of salt on his tongue._

_And then he sees the man. Well, he sees the color before the man—a glint of gold, and then of silver, solidifying into a man’s shape the closer he gets. Which, again, he really ought to be freaking out at this point, shouldn’t he? With Merlin’s track record it’s probably a terrifying shape-shifting creature just waiting to devour his soul or something along those lines._

_But it’s not, he realizes as he gets closer, his heart jumping painfully in his chest. It’s someone familiar._

_“Arthur?”_

_He can barely get the word out, but the gold head turns in surprise and if this **is** a shape-shifting monster, Merlin thinks he’d call his soul an even trade anyway._

_“Merlin?” Arthur says in disbelief. “How did you get here again?”_

_“Again?” Merlin frowns. Something about this does seem familiar. “I’ve had this dream before, haven’t I? Only this feels very…real. Which is strange.”_

_Arthur looks around the empty space thoughtfully. “Have to agree with you there.”_

_He says something else too, something about empty heads and insides reflecting outsides, all of it undoubtedly obnoxious, but Merlin’s stopped listening. He’s been distracted by the revelation that he’s not seen Arthur as **Arthur** in what feels like ages; even in the scattered nightmares that descend whenever he gets more than twenty minutes of sleep, Arthur has been blurry, indistinct. It’s maddening. Looking at him now, Merlin realizes just how fallible human memory is._

_All those years spent serving under Arthur and he still couldn’t recreate him perfectly, couldn’t hold onto tiny details that keep slipping from his grasp no matter how hard he tries to hold on._

_Yet this Arthur is immaculate in his imperfection, and that’s what convinces him._

_“This is real,” Merlin says._

_Arthur stares at him in that way that means Merlin is a special sort of idiot. (He has many nonverbal ways of communicating that opinion; Merlin could practically catalogue them at this point.) “Yes, I thought we’d already established that. I did try to tell you last time.”_

_Last time, last time, when his head had been spinning too fast to realize what was actually going on. “No, this is—” His throat feels clogged and his eyes are burning. “This is **real**. You’re here. You’re you.”_

_It must show on his face how ragged, how wrung-out he feels, because Arthur doesn’t tease. His face softens. “I’m here, Merlin.”_

_There’s a tense moment before Merlin unfreezes himself and walks forward, some insistent part of his brain telling him that if he doesn’t have his king is his arms in the next ten seconds he will actually fly apart—_

_—and suddenly he finds himself looking at the endless darkness again._

_Stricken, he whirls around and sees Arthur looking at him with a similarly stunned expression._

_“Did you just…” Arthur swallows. “Did you just walk **through** me?”_

_Merlin imagines he can hear the thud as his heart hits the bottom of his shoes._

_“Oh,” he says, only his voice sounds odd; distant, with a quality to it that suggests he’s trying to speak with a mouthful of marbles. “So we can’t…” Can’t what? Can’t—?_

_He opens his eyes slowly; the world is white and he’s shaking hard enough that he can hear his teeth clacking together. And there’s a noise—_

_The raven is making startled squawking noises, flapping its feathers nervously, and it’s that more than anything that forces Merlin out of his bleary inertia and wakes him up._

_“ **Forbearnan** ,” he croaks, facing his palm toward the bundle of sticks he’d pushed together before falling asleep like an imbecile; they light up obligingly, the resulting rush of warmth enough to make him shudder._

_He has the presence of mind at least to notice that it’s unseasonably early for snow, certainly too early for this bitter cold. But then, a lot of strange things have been happening lately. Maybe the weather has decided to empathize with them._

_Or maybe that’s a spectacularly arrogant way of looking at it._

_The raven edges closer to him. Merlin picks the bird up, ignoring its halfhearted quorks of protest, and huddles it to his chest, trying to keep the wind off it as best he can._

_“What **was** that?” he murmurs under his breath._

_He’s not expecting an answer, but the raven looks up at him sharply, understanding in those familiar blue eyes, and Merlin’s breath catches in his throat._

_He’s still shaking, and he doesn’t think he can blame all of it on the cold._

_“Are you—are you in there? Can you understand me?”_

_The raven looks at him for a few more seconds before making another throaty noise and turning its face back to the flames. Merlin stares down at its feathery black head and wonders, and wonders._

_After that he makes a point of getting some sleep, hoping to somehow wander back into that—whatever the hell it was, but it doesn’t work. Then the nightmares come back and keep him awake, and perpetually irritable besides, so he goes back to not sleeping at all. At least when he’s exhausted he doesn’t have the energy to be angry._

_But the raven somehow cottons on because it really hounds him, squawking angrily whenever Merlin goes more than two days without rest. It pecks his fingers hard enough to draw blood, so Merlin finally relents and sleeps before his own body betrays him again._

_He ends up sleeping every other night, which is enough both to placate the raven and to keep him so tired he blacks out more than falls asleep, which conveniently means fewer nightmares. Everybody wins._

_It’s some time before he connects the dots, a half-forgotten lecture from Gaius rising back to the surface. An explanation on the different “realms” within the world; it had all gotten painfully theoretical very fast. Merlin mostly remembers his eyes glazing over, but one part had wedged in his mind._

_“In dreams, some believe the boundaries between the physical and spiritual worlds can become blurred,” Gaius had said. “A few magic users have attempted to replicate this through meditation. They believe they can enter the realm of the spirit by drawing on the natural magic of the earth to ease their way.”_

_He’d held up a warning finger. “But success is rare, and even then it is a dangerous thing to wander between realms. It drains the user of magic, and when it has exhausted that it then begins to sap their very life.” A shake of the head. “An exercise better left to theory, in my opinion.”_

_So it’s with silent apologies to his mentor that Merlin gives the meditation thing a go. It’s not something that can be mastered overnight, Gaius had assured him, but that’s fine. Merlin, it seems, has nothing but time._

.

The next day kicks off the mother of all miserable heat waves, which, if the weather app is to be believed, is going to last for the foreseeable future. Which—as far as Mordred’s concerned—basically means they’re all going to die.

He’s taken to lying spread-eagled on the hardwood floor of the bookshop because at least it’s sort of cool down there. It’s also meant he can now add ‘capable of shelving books in the proper order whilst looking at them upside-down’ to his list of useless skills. It says something about the general populace and their reaction to the uncharacteristic (and _unrelenting_ ) heat that not a single customer comments on Mordred’s apparent insanity; the shop’s air conditioning is just as ancient as its heating, so they’re all pretty much preoccupied with getting their books and getting the fuck _out_ as quickly as possible.

Merlin, the poor bastard, is still stuck being professional. Still stuck smiling through gritted teeth and wearing jeans and—well, wearing a shirt, any shirt, because Mordred’s also started forgoing his when he’s working in the back. He isn’t sure what Merlin’s paying him but he’s positive it’s not enough to justify that kind of torture.

He doesn’t see Arthur much, but that’s par for the course, since Arthur in his human form is apparently a recluse when he’s not working on midnight building projects and keeping Mordred _awake_ , thanks very little.

And so it goes.

About four days in Mordred finally decides he’s actually, physically going to go mad if he doesn’t have something other than Dewey to keep his mind off the fact that he’s slowly melting. It’s a slow day, they haven’t had a customer in hours, and Merlin’s been shuffling the same three sheets of paper for the last forty minutes. He’s got a glazed look in his eye; Mordred wonders detachedly if he’s found a way of falling asleep standing up.

“Merlin,” he blurts.

Merlin doesn’t twitch, but he does make a sort of grunting noise that Mordred supposes means he’s paying attention. Arthur, who’s been perched next to him all day in what Mordred can only assume is a show of solidarity (either that or birds are less sensitive to heat than their suffering human counterparts), doesn’t even croak.

“Teach me how to make it snow,” Mordred says. There’s a pleading note in his voice that would be embarrassing if it was anywhere less than a thousand fucking degrees.

That seems to wake Merlin up, at least. “You want me to what now?”

“Snow,” he repeats. “Ice. Popsicles, I really don’t care at this point. I’d sleep on your AC generator _if you had one_.”

Merlin glares at the accusatory tone but doesn’t even try to tell Mordred off for it, which Mordred figures means he’s right. “It’s not simple like it is in Harry Potter,” he grumbles. “Weather magic is a complicated mess. I’m not going to have you calling lightning down on all our heads because you don’t know what you’re doing.”

Mordred perks up slightly, lifting his head up off the floor. “Do you know how to do that? Call down lightning, I mean?”

The raven opens one very blue eye to peer at Merlin, who suddenly looks a bit embarrassed. “I—well—that’s got nothing to do with anything,” he hedges. Mordred’s jaw might drop a little.

“Seriously? And you’re lecturing _me_ about being careful?”

“I’m older than you are,” Merlin replies archly. “Much older. When you’re my age, then we can talk.”

 _Don’t think I’m likely to still be around in a couple thousand years._ He just barely stops himself from saying it—they haven’t actually talked about that night when Mordred vomited both his problems and the contents of his stomach everywhere, and if he were a little less ignorant he might think Merlin’s forgotten that he can apparently wander into other people’s dreams.

But he’s not ignorant, so he still notices when Merlin’s eyes track him a little too long, like he’s afraid of what Mordred will do if left to his own devices. Mordred can’t tell if he should be flattered or hurt by it. After all, Merlin doesn’t know that Mordred once tried to levitate a piece of bread to the toaster and ended up making the toaster explode instead. He’s pretty sure he’s the opposite of menacing.

But whatever. If he can preserve some measure of domestic peace by pretending he doesn’t know Merlin and Arthur are both old as balls, Mordred’s more than willing to play along.

“You could teach me _something_ , then,” he says. “Instead of trying to glare holes in those papers for another hour.” ~~~~

Merlin sighs—he swears Merlin sighs about ten times more whenever Mordred is in the vicinity, just an estimate—and, to his surprise, leaves the desk to plop down on the floor beside Mordred’s head.

He blinks. “It’s much nicer down here.”

“Heat rises,” Mordred drones.

“On that note—come on, sit up—you can’t do lightning, or rather you really, really shouldn’t do lightning, but I can teach you a bit about fire.”

Mordred pauses to cast a dubious look around the very wooden bookshop with its large quantities of flammable books.

Merlin cringes. “It’ll be fine. Really. Probably.” He clears his throat. “So, the first thing we have to address is how much you already know about controlling your magic.”

“Which is nothing,” Mordred supplies.

“It can’t be _nothing_ nothing or you probably would’ve killed someone by now,” Merlin says. Mordred tries not to flinch. “So at the very least you’ve got some awareness that there’s magic in you, and you have some level of control over it.”

“If you say so,” he mumbles.

“It’s all about focus,” Merlin continues, easy the way he only seems to be when he’s trying to explain magic.

 _Only when he forgets who it is he’s talking to_ , Mordred thinks grimly, but he tries to ignore it and pay attention. Focus, and all.

“It’s like…oh, like how you know you’re hungry or tired, and even if you’re not hungry right now, you know you’re going to be later? Like it’s this completely natural thing that’s dormant inside of you. And sometimes, before you can control it, it just rears up when you’re not expecting it to. People get into trouble that way.”

The raven makes a coughing noise Mordred’s gotten pretty sure is his way of laughing. His suspicion is confirmed when Merlin turns and gives the bird a halfhearted look of annoyance.

“Yes, thank you, I know I used to be one of those people.”

“Used to be?” Mordred blurts, remembering waking up on a hard floor.

Merlin turns his glare briefly on Mordred before returning it to a still-snickering Arthur.

“Satisfied?” he demands. “He’s lost all respect for me already.”

It’s strange, Mordred thinks, this easy sort of rapport they seem to have even when one of them has feathers and can’t speak, at least not using words. They’ve clearly figured out other ways of making their feelings known. Mordred wonders just how long that must have taken.

“Anyway,” Merlin is saying. “That was basically a really long-winded way of saying you have to kind of poke your magic first—wake it up—before you can use it.”

Mordred waits for him to clarify, but Merlin just sits there like he’s expecting Mordred to do something.

“You do realize that when I say I don’t know anything about controlling my magic, I mean _I don’t know anything about controlling my magic_?”

“Close your eyes,” Merlin says with uncharacteristic patience. “Feel around. You’ll know it once you find it.”

Mordred really, really doubts that, but he obeys. Stares at the backs of his eyelids and tries to dig around inside of himself or whatever it is Merlin expects him to do.

Seconds tick by. He’s starting to wonder if he could get away with napping under the guise of “training” when he— _finds_ something, there’s no other word for it. It shifts ever so slightly underneath his skin and his eyes open. He feels like he’s just put his tongue on a battery.

Merlin looks satisfied. “Found it?”

“Think so, yeah.” Mordred makes an effort to sound casual, like this is something he does every day rather than a life-altering discovery. He’s woken it up, his mind keeps repeating with jittery excitement; he’s forced it to do something he wants, even if that something is childishly simple, and that means he can force it to do other things.

Like stay hidden.

“Right, so, spells.”

Mordred blinks out of his reverie. “Spells? I thought you said this wasn’t Harry Potter.”

Merlin ignores him. “Some of us can use our magic without spells, but when you’re a beginner that’s really not wise. Spells…sort of _direct_ the magic. Keep it on track and more or less contained. Some magic users can’t do nonverbal spells at all.

“They can get complicated, especially since the language has changed so much, and good luck finding a book anywhere that agrees on pronunciation and diction and what-have-you. The fire spell is pretty basic, though. It’s _forbearnan_.”

“Forbearnan,” Mordred repeats, cautious.

The corner of Merlin’s mouth twists up. “Relax, just saying the word isn’t going to blow us to bits. Especially not the way you’re saying it. It’s for-bear-nan, not for- _bear_ -nan.”

A crack about the proper pronunciation of Wingardium Leviosa is on the tip of Mordred’s tongue, but he bites it back—if he makes one more Harry Potter reference Merlin might lose it and blow _him_ up. So he repeats the odd word a few more times until Merlin nods.

“Good enough. That’s the easy part done. Now you need to give your magic something to do—visualize what you want, and I mean visualize hard. You need a clear picture or it isn’t going to work.” Merlin closes his eyes as if to demonstrate. “I’m thinking a small flame is a good idea, so…”

His eyes open suddenly, and Mordred gets a heart-stopping glimpse of them going bright gold as Merlin murmurs, “ _Forbearnan_.”

A tiny flame materializes in the palm of his hand.

Mordred’s pretty sure his own eyes are about to fall out of his head.

“Doesn’t it burn?” he whispers. He’s not sure why he’s whispering.

Merlin shakes his head. “It’s hovering a little over my skin, see? You should probably specify that when you’re visualizing, too; self-preservation instinct usually beats out whatever desire your magic has to run amok, but it never hurts to be careful.”

He closes his palm and when he opens it again, the flame has disappeared. Mordred stares at his empty hand like an idiot.

 _If I’ve gone crazy,_ he muses, _this is probably the coolest delusion I could’ve had._

“Your turn,” Merlin prompts.

Mordred swallows. “Oh. Right.”

He closes his eyes and tries to visualize what he’s trying to do. It’s harder than he suspects it ought to be, especially with ‘ _you’re sitting on the floor of a public building trying to conjure up fire, you’ve well and truly lost it_ ’ running on a loop in his head.

_Don’t listen to it. Focus on the flame. Focus on the tiny, harmless little flame._

“That’s it,” he hears Merlin say as if from far away. “Just concentrate.”

_Concentrate, yeah. Keep it under control. You won’t hurt anyone this time._

He flinches away from the thought, his eyes opening unbidden—figuring it’s now or never, he shouts the spell. Even as he does it he’s not sure why he’s shouting.

A bonfire engulfs his hand.

Even as he’s yelling, panicking, waving his arm around in a wild attempt to put it out, Mordred registers two things: one, the flame is easily ten times the size of what Merlin just showed him; and two, it doesn’t feel like it’s burning him at all.

“Mordred! Mordred, _calm down_.”

 _You try calming down when half your arm’s on fire, you arse,_ Mordred thinks, but even as he thinks it, the fire slowly dies away.

There’s a minute of absolute silence.

Then Mordred finds the words to croak, “Are my eyebrows still on?”

Merlin makes a sound like he’s choking. Mordred looks up in alarm, only to see that he’s laughing—practically crying with laughter, the absolute bastard.

“I wasn’t being funny,” he protests, but that only makes Merlin laugh harder. He’s going to tip over sideways and hit his head on the floor and Mordred isn’t going to feel one iota of sympathy for him. “You’re a terrible person.”

From his perch, Arthur makes a noise that sounds an awful lot like agreement.

Merlin finally takes several deep breaths and regains control over himself, even if he keeps muttering “Oh my god. Oh my _god_ ,” under his breath and sounding no less amused.

“You are the worst magical mentor ever,” Mordred grumbles.

Merlin just smirks. “Again. Maybe think less volume this time.”

Mordred privately thinks that if he _does_ end up setting this place on fire, Merlin will have earned the resulting loss of his eyebrows entirely.

.

The heat wave continues. Merlin, out of some heretofore-unknown sadistic streak, keeps Mordred working on the fire spell even though it still feels upward of a million freaking degrees without his help. At least it’s more distracting than trying to remember how the Dewey system works when his brain feels like it’s on fire.

Arthur continues to poke his head in when the sun goes down, usually just to say hello before he goes off and does…whatever Arthur does, Mordred kind of feels bad that he doesn’t know what the person sheltering him does in his free time. He’s pretty sure he likes to run. Fixes things sometimes, or builds them; Mordred occasionally hears the sound of a power drill being activated and imagines Arthur wielding it as cheerfully as any sword.

Well, it’s not much of a stretch to imagine Arthur being a sword kind of person, especially considering how old he is.

It’s odd, that. Mordred notices it only because he knows to look for it now; he doesn’t think he’d ever have noticed as a disinterested bystander. But it’s there—those moments when he remembers he’s staying with people who are literally ancient.

“We’ll try for a sphere today, I think,” Merlin tells him, after he’s shut the blinds and put up a sign on the door that proclaims his lunch break. “Now that you’ve got the basics down. Obviously you have the power to work the spell, so the issue now is control. Try condensing the fire into a shape, this time.”

Mordred’s look must betray his deep skepticism, because Merlin rolls his eyes.

“You don’t have to do it right off. Just start the same as always, I’ll talk you through it.”

It’s easier every day to call his magic up from wherever it rests when Mordred isn’t using it, easier to nudge and prod until it barely feels like he’s exerting an effort. He’s got flames licking up his arm in moments—only up to his wrist, this time; he is _starting_ to gain some control. Along with the ability to not freak the fuck out when he’s for all intents and purposes on fire.

Filed under: Unexpected benefits of apprenticing oneself to a sorcerer.

“Good,” Merlin is saying. “Now hold it for a minute; I want to make sure you have control before we try this.”

“So when do we get to lightning?” Mordred asks, trying to keep his mind off the effort of holding the flames in place a mere inch from his skin.

Merlin doesn’t answer, which is odd, because normally this is where he says something to the effect of “that’d be never, Mordred, now focus” because he is the master of killing Mordred’s joy.

This time, though, nothing. Mordred spares him a sideways glance.

Merlin’s eyes are catching the firelight; he seems almost entranced by it. “It’s sort of funny, when you think about it,” he murmurs, only Mordred doesn’t feel like he’s being spoken to at all. “I spent all that time hiding, terrified that someone would find out what I could do and kill me for it. How many people were killed because they were stupid, or they got unlucky? Just for being what they were?”

He shakes his head, mouth curving up in a wry smile. “And now here we are. I could stand in the middle of Trafalger Square and summon a bonfire in full view of the world, and no one would blink. They’d all assume I was faking it somehow.”

“Seems safer now,” Mordred points out carefully. “I mean, would you want to go back?”

Merlin’s eyes refocus, like he’s remembered Mordred is there.

“Sometimes,” he says quietly. “Things were a lot more dangerous, yeah, but sometimes I think they were…simpler.”

There’s something in his expression that is abruptly, painfully old. Mordred can nearly see the wrinkles scored into his face by centuries of loving and losing and watching. Hell, he even sounds like an old man, remembering his Golden Years or some shit like that.

‘Course, Mordred isn’t one to judge. After all, he remembers with a twinge, even if magic was a burning offense way back when, it was also the last time Merlin and Arthur were both human.

He’s seen that aged look on Arthur’s face too, is the thing, and Mordred realizes suddenly that it’s exhaustion—sheer, unimaginable exhaustion, piled on over years and years with no relief in sight.

He can’t begin to comprehend how they haven’t both gone mad by now.

The thought comes unbidden: _There’s got to be some way of fixing it, hasn’t there?_

Merlin clears his throat pointedly. Mordred glances down to find the fire has climbed all the way up to his elbow. With a little yelp, he forces it back down. Merlin snorts, and when he speaks again it’s in a perfectly normal tone.

“And that,” he says, “is why you can’t do lightning. You’d incinerate us all.”

“Oh, because _you’re_ so responsible,” Mordred grouses. “I still don’t get why we’re messing about with _fire_ in a building full of _books_. Doesn’t anything about that maybe read ‘trouble’ to you?”

“I’m counting on your self-preservation instincts,” Merlin replies. “If you so much as singed one of my books—”

“They’d never find all my pieces?” Mordred guesses, unimpressed. “God, you know how dramatic you are, right?”

Merlin grins. “Well, I was going to say there wouldn’t be any pieces left to find, but I guess that works.”

“Ha, ha,” Mordred deadpans, squinting at the flame until it’s back down to an acceptable distance from his face. “What now?”

“Try to condense it.” Then, when Mordred makes a noise to convey how spectacularly unhelpful that advice is, “Press it down. Mold it into something specific.”

It sounds simple enough, Mordred admits, but it’s bloody hard. Like trying to hold water in your hands; there’s always something slipping through, out of your control. He’s sweating in under a minute, and it’s not just the heat doing it.

He thinks he’s starting to get it though, the flames reluctantly folding over one another and Merlin’s voice murmuring something vaguely encouraging, which is a minor miracle in and of itself so he must be doing a decent job—

Which is of course when the cawing starts, loud and out of nowhere and Mordred _jumps_.

And then it’s like that first time again, the flames leaping gleefully from every single constriction he’s tried to put them under and Mordred doesn’t even have time to freak out over that before he notices the black shape hurtling directly toward the flames.

He has no time time to think, doesn’t know if he yells or if Merlin does or if either of them actually move, but something in his mind clicks and Mordred clenches his fist.

The flames disappear like they’ve had a bucket of water dumped on them, and the raven flies by unharmed as the sound of a tinkling bell hits Mordred’s ears.

“Excuse me,” someone is saying from the open shop door. “Are you—”

“We’re closed,” Merlin says, but he doesn’t look like he’s even hearing himself, still looking from Arthur to Mordred and back like his brain is furiously working to understand what just happened.

The man sounds irritated now. “But your sign says—”

Merlin’s across the room in a flash, eyes blazing.

“We. Are. _Closed_ ,” he says through gritted teeth. “Pretty sure that’s what the sign says, doesn’t it?”

He shuts the door without waiting for an answer, locking it this time. Mordred sits on the ground with his mouth hanging open and watches Merlin stare a hole in the wall, a hand going to his face and then dropping again.

“I think we’re done for the day,” he says. “I think…”

His voice trails off. Mordred swallows and forces his brain to make actual words.

“Want me to lock up?”

Merlin turns to look at him. “That—that’d be great, yeah.”

He heads for the stairs, absently holding out an arm for the raven to fly over and perch on. Mordred thinks of something.

“Thank him for me, will you?”

Merlin glances back over his shoulder. “For what? For being an idiot?”

Mordred shrugs. “It’s just—if he hadn’t done that, we’d’ve been caught.”

Merlin exhales shakily. “I know. I’ll…I’ll tell him.”

“Thanks.”

Mordred pulls himself up off the floor, half-convinced the fire’s going to leap out of his skin again now that he’s given it a taste of freedom, but it doesn’t. He supposes that’s something.

“Mordred.”

He turns. “Yeah?”

Merlin seems to be struggling with something, but at last he manages, “You did well.” And then retreats before Mordred has time to retrieve his jaw from the floor.

.

Merlin kicks off his shoes and collapses onto the sofa in silence. The raven perches on the cushion behind him, patient. Or maybe just waiting for the storm to break.

The thing is, Merlin hasn’t got one. That jolt of adrenaline downstairs has left him drained, never mind confused, leaving him with zero energy to shout Arthur down for being reckless.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” he asks wearily. “Are you trying to give me a heart attack, is that it?”

The raven nips at his fingers in lieu of an answer. Merlin sighs and strokes the sleek feathers.

“You’re not actually an idiot, Arthur. I know you’re trying to make a point here.”

A disinterested _quork_ is his only response.

“Is it that he stopped?” Merlin asks. “Is that it? He’s startled, sees this great black thing flying at his face and his first response is to just…”

Mordred’s face flickers in his mind, terrified but for one second utterly resolute. He’s been shit at the control thing up to now, not that Merlin’s one to talk, and yet he’d managed to cut off the flames in the blink of an eye. It had looked instinctive, too—it had to be; there’d been no time to think about it, just one extended moment of heart-stopping fear. Merlin knows. He’s pretty sure they both had the same look on their face.

One single second of being on the same page.

Improbable, but apparently not impossible.

“So maybe he’s not _necessarily_ plotting to kill us both in our sleep,” Merlin admits. The words are more or less dragged out of him against his will, but he’ll lose the right to berate Arthur for being hard-headed if he gets just as bad. “Maybe.”

Here’s where it gets tricky. Merlin feels like he’s trying to balance on a tightrope that won’t bloody stop moving.

“I’ll try to be nicer to him, alright? And maybe you could stand to write me a damn note instead of throwing yourself at an inferno next time.”

The raven tilts its head. Merlin imagines he can hear Arthur’s voice in the gesture: _Of course I could have dodged the flames at the last possible second, Merlin, your lack of faith really is insulting._

“You’re a pain in my arse,” Merlin says with feeling. He’s starting to feel like he’s sinking into the cushions, a long day catching up with his body. “An absolutely terrific pain.”

As his eyes slide shut, he can sense a small warmth burrowing in next to his head, and he grins.

“You smell terrible,” he remarks, and then yelps when a sharp little beak pecks at his ear.

.

Doing magic for extended periods of time, Mordred’s discovered, is really tiring. It’s like he’s working muscles he didn’t know he had. And if magic is a muscle, then Mordred is woefully out of shape. Typical.

The one upside to this is that when he curls up in his musty armchair at night, he tends to fall asleep so fast it’s like someone took a mallet to his head. Apparently sufficient exhaustion is enough to counter a hideously uncomfortable bed.

So Mordred’s more than a little irritated when he tries to sleep that night and can’t.

It’s all Merlin’s fault, he thinks mulishly, turning over for the fifth time in as many minutes. Merlin and that depressed little cloud over his head and his old man eyes. The look on his face when the raven went flying toward the fire and Mordred’s stomach just _dropped_.

He doesn’t think he’d understood up until that point. Hell, he still doesn’t have actual confirmation that Merlin and Arthur are a Thing. But that expression had said a lot; Mordred might not’ve realized it until he’d managed to get his own heart rate down to something resembling normal, but afterward…well. He’s not intimately familiar with the look of a man tethered to sanity by exactly one thread, but Mordred’s pretty sure he saw it this afternoon.

Arthur is apparently that thread, and if Mordred looks at all of Merlin’s actions through that lens then a whole lot of things start to make more sense.

And it’s not just Merlin, either, even if Arthur’s less blatant about it. Mordred sees the same invisible lines around Arthur’s face that he does around Merlin’s. They put up a decent front but even Mordred can tell that they’re worn down. Tired.

Groaning, Mordred gives up and sits up, reaches for his phone. If he’s going to make a go at this whole insomnia thing, he might as well get some homework out of the way.

His frustration grows as he thumbs through his texts, looking for the last assignment he’d been sent. He doesn’t know what to do. There’s nothing _to_ do—he’s somehow ended up trapped in the orbit of two very strange people and all that’s left for him is to ride it out and hope he doesn’t get flung out into space. That’s all. He can’t care beyond that.

_You did well._

Mordred shakes his head and jabs at his phone with more force than the situation requires. The astronomy article they’re meant to read begins to load onscreen.

Honestly, he knows he’s just being an idiot. So what if Merlin’s crumbs of encouragement make it seem like he’s doing something right for a change? So what if Arthur’s sideways smiles make Mordred feel like he’s a part of something?

What’s it mean when Mordred’s starting to think his own tethers to sanity are magic lessons and hours spent shelving old books?

“Shit,” he mutters out loud. That about seems to sum this situation up.

He’s sick of constantly being in orbit, is the thing. Orbiting sucks. Orbiting is being swung around in circles over and over until he doesn’t know which way is up; it’s being trapped in the same patterns, the same way of thinking. It’s being trapped, period. And Mordred’s been feeling trapped for a long time—stuck in that fucking unhelpful cycle of fear and avoidance. He wants to break out of it. He wants to _do_ something, preferably something that doesn’t involve petty theft or running away from his problems.

_I just want to help._

Maybe he’s turning into an altruist. Ha.

The article finally loads. Mordred straightens up and tries to shake away thoughts that aren’t going to get him anywhere. Time to to muster up some enthusiasm for umbras and moon paths.

Three paragraphs of heinously dull scientific jargon later, Mordred is convinced that this was the perfect assignment to fall asleep to. The thought is practically cheering.

On the fourth paragraph, his thumb freezes mid-scroll.

Because, see, there’s a damn good reason why Mordred is still a believer in luck/fate/whatever: Sometimes shit happens with such perfect timing that he doesn’t know what to call it, other than destiny.


	8. Chapter 8

.

“So, you and Arthur.”

Merlin pauses in the middle of his filing. Thrilling as that particular task might be, it’s more unusual that Mordred asks him anything resembling a personal question. He assumes that kind of thing is normally directed at Arthur, who, Merlin readily admits, has been less likely to bite Mordred’s head off for trying.

But he’s trying to be nicer, so he turns. Mordred is squinting in concentration, trying to levitate three books behind the desk; he’s been at it for five minutes now and seems to be holding up pretty well. After a second he seems to realize he’s trailed off and finishes.

“Are you two…you know.”

Merlin blinks. Not exactly what he’d been expecting, but they’ve been “you know” for a very long time now, the world’s perception of that sort of thing shifting rapidly around them, so the question doesn’t make his hackles go up like it would have once. And, he reminds himself firmly, he’s _trying_ to be nicer.

“We are,” he says.

Mordred nods thoughtfully, still not taking his eyes off the floating books. “Thought so. It’s weird, even though I never get to see you two together—like, properly together—it’s so obvious. Brick-to-the-head obvious. You’re like an old married couple bickering all the time.”

“If you never see us together, how can you know we bicker all the time?” Merlin retorts. Mordred just smirks.

“The way you talk about each other. Like I said—obvious.”

Merlin doesn’t actually have a counterargument.

He gives Mordred the hairy eyeball instead and returns to his sorting. Mrs. Ragnell has dropped off another cardboard box filled with moldy first-edition paperbacks; she insists on making similar “donations” every few weeks. Merlin’s fairly sure she only gives so generously because she’s cleaning out her attic and wants to get rid of stuff easily, but he still doesn’t have the heart to tell her that most of them aren’t worth much.

He’s trying not to inhale the smell of…whatever seems to be lingering around the tattered Agatha Christie novel when Mordred speaks up again.

“So I’ve been wondering.”

“I’m working, Mordred.”

“Humor me.” He hesitates. “So this…thing with you two. The whole…” Mordred flaps his hands a few times like he’s got really tiny wings. The books move sluggishly up and down but stay airborne. “You know. That thing.”

Merlin frowns. “What about it?”

“You said it was a curse, right?”

Merlin stiffens for just a second, but his hands keep moving so he doesn’t think the boy notices. He doesn’t really want to have this conversation.

“I did.”

“Then that means someone cursed you, doesn’t it?”

“I guess so, yeah.”

“You _guess_?”

Merlin gives up, tosses _Sparkling Cyanide_ on the desk with a smack and turns to look Mordred in the face.

“Why are you asking about this?” he demands. “What are you actually trying to get at?”

Mordred looks taken aback. “I just wanted to—”

“Yes. _Yes_ , all right? The Sidhe cursed us because I was an idiot and forgot that their kind will fuck you over at every opportunity. They _hated_ me and I still trusted them with Arthur’s life.” He takes a deep breath. “I was stupid, and now we’re stuck. That’s it.”

The books hit the floor in a succession of heavy thuds. Mordred sits up straighter, eyes blazing.

“That’s _not_ it,” he says. “If they cursed you, doesn’t that mean they can get rid of the curse too?”

“Exactly _how_ long do you think I’ve been doing this?” Merlin rubs at his forehead. He can feel the migraine coming on. “Of course it stands to reason that the Sidhe could undo their own magic. It makes perfect sense.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

Merlin glares. “It was the _first thing_ I tried to do! But they’d made me swear to stay away from Avalon in exchange for Arthur’s life. I went back and I—” He swallows hard against a sea of rising memories. “I couldn’t find the lake. It was like I kept getting turned around without realizing it. I waited years, decades—I thought maybe it would wear off if I waited long enough, but it never did.”

“Couldn’t you send Arthur to…?”

Merlin’s already shaking his head again. “Avalon was well hidden even when Camelot stood. Arthur’d never been there when he was in his right mind, and now I couldn’t even help him find it.” He sighs. “Besides, I’m pretty sure they’ve cloaked it somehow. It’s the only thing that explains how they’ve managed to stay hidden all this time. I could probably dig up a spell to break the cloaking, but I’d need to _find_ the place to be able to do that.”

“But if—”

“And even if we did, by some miracle, get into Avalon, you don’t understand how the Sidhe work. They’ll never reverse a bargain once it’s been set. Even if we got them to end it somehow, it would only stop the cycle. One of us would still be…” He shudders, wondering how long it would take a person to go mad, trapped permanently in an animal’s body. Arthur had managed to hold out for decades; could Merlin hold out for centuries? Millennia?

There’s a thoughtful pause.

“So they’ve got one of you on a string at any given time, yeah?” Mordred says.

“That’s the gist of it, yes.”

“And what if neither of you had strings on? What if you could just cut them all at once?”

There’s a feverish light in Mordred’s eyes. Merlin wonders if he ought to be concerned that a teenager is so clearly going mad before his eyes.

“You mean, if we could end the bargain while we were both human?” he says, cautious. “That could work, yeah, if we stopped the cycle while neither of us were affected by it. But haven’t you been listening? It’s impossible.”

“No,” says Mordred, triumphant. “It’s not.”

He slides his phone across the desk and gestures for Merlin to look at it.

It’s an article on some rare astronomical thing, a solar eclipse that apparently has scientists flipping tables. Merlin looks at it and feels utterly nonplussed.

“What exactly am I looking at?” he asks.

Mordred fidgets. “It’s just—I’ve been thinking, you know? Since I found out about your whole…” He waves an arm somewhat frantically. “Problem. You know.”

_Yes, that ‘problem’ where one of us has fur half the time and the other has feathers, I think I can make that leap._

“Well, anyway, I started thinking. Because the whole thing is based on night and day, right? Arthur is—you know—during the day, and then at night you’re—”

“A dog,” Merlin cuts in, because honestly, if he has to hear the words _you know_ in this conversation one more time he won’t be held responsible for what happens.

“Yeah. Erm.” Mordred gulps. “But, so, what if there _wasn’t_ a day or a night? Technically. I mean—”

“Like an eclipse,” Merlin says slowly. The hairs on the back of his neck are beginning to stand up. “That—but that doesn’t make sense. There’ve been loads of eclipses since this happened. Nothing’s ever changed.”

But that’s not entirely true, is it? He remembers how dark it had been that night when he’d tried to break the spell, that unnatural pitch-black with no moonlight to speak of, and a shiver runs down his spine.

Seven minutes. Maybe this has happened before.

Mordred is ticking off points on his fingers. “One: Total solar eclipses are really rare. Like, _really_ rare. Two: Not everyone gets to see the whole thing—I’m talking full coverage, no light, dark skies, all that. You’ve got to be in _exactly_ the right place at _exactly_ the right time. Which—wait for it—we’re actually going to be.”

He grins. “Ms. Fray’d be proud. Pretty sure she thinks I sleep through astronomy.”

Merlin’s barely listening anymore. A long-forgotten feeling is stirring somewhere inside him—he thinks it might actually be hope, after all this time, and that never ends well. He presses his fingers into his eyes, pushing back the headache, trying to ground himself.

“All right, so say that works.” Even admitting that much feels like something massive. “There’s still the tiny problem of not being able to get to the Sidhe in the first place. I can’t find them, and Arthur can’t reach them.”

Mordred leans forward. His eyes are still fever-bright.

“No,” he says. “But I can.”

Just like that, the tentative embers in his chest die. It’s almost a relief.

He shakes his head. “No.”

Mordred’s face falls. “Why not?” he demands. “You need someone who hasn’t sworn to stay away from Avalon, and you also need someone who’s got magic enough to find whatever invisibility cloak they’ve put over themselves. Who else do you know who fits both those boxes?”

It’s true, and it’s also not the point. But for some stupid reason Merlin finds himself making up other excuses. “You honestly think you could find the lake?”

“Yeah. I mean, why not?” Mordred shrugs with all of a teenager’s bravado. “I’m magic, and they’re magic. There’s got to be some way of, you know, sensing them or something.”

“ _That’s_ your master plan? Use the Force?”

Mordred lets out a frustrated noise. “Look, I’m trying to be helpful here! What do you _want_ from me?”

Merlin takes a deep breath and straightens up. He needs to think; he needs to be somewhere _not here_.

“I want you to drop this,” he says quietly. “I want you to work on controlling your magic. And I want you to not say anything about this to Arthur.” _Not yet, not until I have some idea of whether it can work._

He can’t offer Arthur that hope only to see it disintegrate. Even lying to him again would be better than that.

Merlin edges around Mordred, gets out from behind the desk and walks to the door. “I’m going to get some groceries. Mind the till, would you?”

“Why can’t you just trust me for once?”

It’s Mordred’s voice, and it’s tired and sad but that same stupid tug at his insides prevents Merlin from giving the answer he should. Which is an unequivocal _no, never, never again._

“I’ll be back soon,” he says instead, and leaves without looking back.

.

Mordred stares at the door long after Merlin’s gone through it. He’s gripping the edge of the desk, his knuckles going white with the effort.

Through the hurt and the anger and the disbelief there’s still the question, that same damn question that keeps replaying in his mind:

_How do you feel guilty about something you don’t remember doing?_

_How, Mordred?_

.

A note is stuck to Arthur’s forehead when he wakes up.

One of these days, he’s going to have to Google whether Post-It glue can be toxic on human skin. Bemused, he pulls it off and reads the single sentence:

_Gone out._

That’s it. Arthur flips the note over—nothing.

Sure enough, when he looks around, Merlin is nowhere to be seen.

“Could you have possibly been more vague?” he mutters to no one. Really, it must be something about magic types—in retrospect, Arthur doesn’t think he’s ever met one that didn’t spout riddles and/or prophecy at him at least once. It’s as if they’re all allergic to simple straight answers.

Well, fine. Arthur’s got work to do anyway; the bookshelves in the back are in need of some sanding down.

.

At some point after they’d gone and settled down—if one could call it that—into the bookshop, Arthur had been put in charge of all things that needed _fixing_. Something his former self would have scoffed at, undoubtedly, but Arthur’s life has taken rather a lot of turns that his far-younger self would never have anticipated.

Marrying someone he loved, for one, and a commoner at that. Knighting thieves and fugitives who also happened to be some of the most loyal men he knew. Flouting his father’s laws. Protecting users of magic.

Failing to protect those closest to him.

Dying was the one thing he _had_ anticipated all those years ago, something that was never a question, never in doubt. Not a king in living memory had managed the feat that was dying of old age, so he’d always simply assumed he’d die young, hopefully in battle; preferably after siring an heir or two to rule the kingdom well after his death. It had almost happened, too.

Arthur has never told Merlin this, but he’d felt a sense of contentment at the end. He hadn’t managed the siring part, perhaps, but he had left behind the most capable queen Camelot could ask for, and the deadliest threats to the kingdom lay buried in its soil. All things considered, he’d done all right. He thinks he might’ve actually managed to die in peace.

But Merlin was Merlin was Merlin, possibly as powerful as he was stubborn, and that hadn’t happened.

It ended up being just the first in an entirely new list of things Arthur never expected to happen. Turning into a _bird_ certainly took the cake, he thinks wryly, but there have been other things. Seeing the world—or parts of it—beyond his country’s borders. Living to a very old age after all. Co-owning a bookshop.

Falling in love, again.

Which is neither here nor there, but he can’t deny it wasn’t something he’d ever thought would happen. Particularly considering the massive inconvenience of being, well, what they are. But then again, nothing about Merlin has ever been _convenient_.

So really, when it comes down to it, his picking up carpentry is actually the least strange thing that’s happened to Arthur in his life. He’d discovered rather quickly that while he’s perfectly good at numbers and the like, he is prone to losing his mind when faced with filing or shelving; a more deathly boring task, he is certain, has never been devised by man. And there’s not much else to do in a bookshop, is there?

Fortunately, the building they chose to set up shop in had been old even when they acquired it, and as such has always had an ample supply of things that need fixing. Leaky pipes, broken-down bookshelves, squeaky floorboards, and so on. Arthur suspects that somewhere along the way Merlin had actually started going out of his way to purchase furniture that was two steps away from collapsing into pieces just to keep his housemate occupied, but he’s never been able to confirm it.

Judicious use of the internet combined with a healthy dose of grim-faced determinism has served him quite well since the former’s inception; before that, Arthur was forced to rely on trial and error, which…had sometimes produced decent results, and other times produced utter chaos. For every magnificently restored 18th-century bookshelf (still a source of pride; in the daytime he crows furiously at anyone who touches it in less than an appropriately reverent manner) there have been at least two ill-repaired floorboards that actually fell through when stepped on.

(Also there had been that incident with the ceiling tile and the dowager countess and the resulting concussion, but Arthur will insist to the end of his days that that one hadn’t been his fault.)

It’s not the most exciting thing in the world after leading armies and ruling a kingdom, granted, but there’s definitely something to be said for entering the shop and knowing that nearly every inch of it has been cared for with his own hands.

He wonders if it’s stupidly optimistic to hope the same can be said of the boy now living there. It’s not like he’d done such a terrific job of it the first time, after all.

He supposes they’ll have to find out.

Mordred is doing something on his phone when Arthur approaches.

“H’llo,” he says.

“Still awake?” Arthur asks.

Mordred shrugs. “Texting a friend. Kind of hoping he’s not trying to track the GPS on my phone or something, find out where I am.”

It’s probably ridiculous that Arthur can still be surprised by what modern technology is capable of, and yet. “Can they actually do that?”

Half a grin, lit by the pixels of the screen. “No. I turned off the GPS ages ago.”

“Smart,” Arthur says, approving. He hauls a pile of books off the opposing armchair and lowers them—very carefully—to the floor before sitting down.

“So has Merlin set you on bodyguard duty or…?”

Arthur snorts. “No. He did disappear last night, though. I wondered if you might know what that was about.” Best to be straightforward about these sorts of things, he feels. Less room for misunderstandings that way.

Mordred sets the phone down, leaving them to squint at each other in the half-dark. “He really doesn’t trust me, does he?”

This again. Arthur sighs. “Mordred, I told you. Just give him—”

“ _Time_ , I know.” The boy’s mouth tightens, but he shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter. I wanted to talk to you, actually.”

“What about?”

“I had this—this idea.” Now Mordred hesitates. “I don’t know that you’ll like it, though.”

Curious, Arthur says, “Maybe not, but I’ll have brought it on myself.” Seeing that the boy still isn’t convinced, he adds, “I’m no good with mysteries, as I’m sure Merlin would be all too happy to tell you. So come on, out with it.”

Mordred swallows hard.


	9. Chapter 9

.

There’s a Post-It stuck to the headboard when he wakes up:

_Were you ever going to tell me?_

Merlin is abruptly awake and feels like he’s swallowed a bucket of ice water.

He flops back down to the pillow and closes his eyes against the burning; he doesn’t think he actually managed to get any sleep. All he’d done was wander the city, aimless, thinking in circles and dreaming in more circles.

And now there’s this.

Betrayal tastes bitter on the back of his tongue, and anger is easier than shame.

_This is what you get for forgetting, even for a second. This is what you get for thinking things will change._

Merlin vaults off the bed, gets dressed and takes the stairs two at a time; Arthur is gone who-knows-where, so there’s no one to force him to stop and think.

His hands are shaking so badly it takes him three tries to fit the key in the lock of the downstairs door.

When he finally fumbles the door open Mordred is standing there already, as if summoned by the pure force of Merlin’s anger, hand upraised like he’d been about to knock, standing straight and meeting Merlin’s eyes like he’s got nothing to be ashamed of.

Merlin thinks he actually sees red.

He doesn’t bother with magic; instead he grabs Mordred’s collar and shoves him bodily up against the opposite wall.

“I was just coming up to see you,” Mordred says, infuriatingly calm.

“What the hell have you been telling him?” Merlin demands. “Let’s set aside for the moment the fact that the Sidhe can’t be talked around by a child—”

“At least I’m trying!” Mordred snaps. “If you would just _trust_ me—”

The words are out of his mouth before he thinks about them. “Trust you? I’ve only ever made that mistake once.”

Blue eyes widen. And then Mordred’s face morphs into a scowl of pure fury.

“Then why did you let me stay here? Why did you teach me to control my magic? Why do any of it if you were just going to keep me at arm’s length anyway? What was the bloody _point_?”

“The point was to keep you close—”

“Like you do with your enemies, right.” A bitter laugh. “Are you serious right now? I’ve done _nothing_ to you! You think I don’t know what you see when you look at me?”

Merlin freezes. Mordred is still glaring defiantly at him, but there’s a flicker of nervousness in his eyes, like he hadn’t meant to give that last bit away.

“What are you talking about?”

Mordred cringes but he doesn’t back down. “I know about the other Mordred. I’ve known for ages. What, did you think you were being subtle or something?”

Somewhere underneath the shock, Merlin is starting to realize that he’s an idiot. The dreamscape, his argument with Arthur, and Mordred listening in on the whole thing; of course he would put two and two together. This could not possibly be going any worse.

“Then you should understand,” he says tightly. “You should know why I can’t take that chance.”

Mordred snaps.

“ _I’m not him!_ ” It’s almost a scream. “I know who you think I am, but I’ve never been that person! He’s _dead_ , Merlin. He’s been dead for way longer than I’ve been alive, and I am _not_ him.”

There are tears in his eyes, and Merlin feels a stab of guilt. He forces himself to remember why he’s doing this in the first place.

“I can’t lose him again, Mordred.”

“So what, you’ll let him waste half his life being a _bird_? Face it, you fucked up—” Merlin flinches “—and maybe the other Mordred fucked up too, maybe all of you did, but we can fix this, don’t you get that? We can do something about it! _I_ can do something about it, if you’ll just get past this stupid hangup of yours for five fucking seconds and _listen_ to me!”

“Is that what this is about? We’re all supposed to redeem ourselves somehow with this plan of yours?”

“I told you,” Mordred bites out. “I’m not him. I never have been. This isn’t an atonement thing, and to be honest? I’ve stopped giving a shit whether you think I ought to feel guilty or not.”

Merlin feels like he lost control of the conversation somewhere. “Then why are you doing this?”

Mordred swallows hard. “Because Arthur seems like a good person. He doesn’t deserve this. And you—well, I’ll be honest, you’re kind of an arse, but I don’t think you deserve it either. It seems like…I don’t know. I guess it just seems like you’ve both been through enough. And I want to help, if I can.”

Déjà vu hits again. Desperate blue eyes, a voice in his head pleading for Merlin’s help. And then that same voice swearing never to forgive, never to forget.

Merlin hasn’t forgotten either. It’s like Mordred said—he’s already fucked up once. He can’t afford to make the same mistake twice.

He lets Mordred go.

“You need to leave,” he says.

Mordred stumbles back against the wall, confusion on his face. “What?”

“You need to leave,” Merlin repeats. “Get your things and go home, Mordred. Your family’s got to be worried sick over you.”

He isn’t sure what reaction he’s expecting—more screaming, perhaps a nice dramatic fireball—but it isn’t what he gets. Mordred sets his jaw.

“My mum is the only family I’ve got,” he says. “And the day I left home, the day I lost control, she wasn’t around to stop me. If she had been—if she’d been in that room—I’d’ve killed her.” His voice wavers. “I wouldn’t’ve meant to, and it wouldn’t’ve made a damn bit of difference. That’s why I left. That’s why I asked for your help.”

Merlin doesn't cringe, but it’s a near thing. Because his memory of his old life is still clear, so much clearer than the interim years have become as centuries have worn on. He remembers his own mother, softness and the scent of herbs, and how sad her smile had been when she’d told him he had to keep his powers a secret.

He’d been so young—he hadn’t understood what might happen if he lost control, not really. Hadn’t understood that his was never the only neck on the line. But things could have gone another way, Merlin knows. Every second dictates a different future. And in some other future, maybe he would be standing where Mordred now stands.

But he isn’t. And Merlin has always been selfish and scared when it comes to Arthur; he knows that too.

“I’m sorry, Mordred.”

Mordred stares at him. “So that’s it, then?”

A voice in his head screams that he’s making another mistake, but Merlin keeps it together. “Take care of yourself, all right?”

The boy says nothing in response, just pushes past Merlin and disappears into the back room to get his things. It’s going to be odd for a while, going back there and not finding it occupied, but Merlin tells himself that many people have come and gone over the years. Mordred is just the odd one that’s managed to do so twice.

He doesn’t even bother trying to open up shop. It’s a shit day anyway, forebodingly dark skies and humidity a wet blanket over everything, so it’s not like they’re going to be overly busy.

Instead Merlin goes upstairs and gets back into bed. He sort of never wants to leave it, not that that’ll save him.

There’s not a fiber in him that wants to have this conversation.

But he can’t ignore it—they haven’t made it this far by ignoring the issues, not when doing just that caused so many problems in their old lives. Not when just having a conversation takes monumental effort.

It’s effort he’s going to have to make, and Merlin forces himself to relax. It’s stupid to try accessing the dreamscape so soon after the last time; it’s draining, tapping into the magic of dreams, into that ever-blurry border between reality and mental construct and finding Arthur there, and he’s never quite sure whether he’s going to wander out of it again. But this isn’t a conversation they can have stretched out through handwritten notes and forty-eight hours.

He drifts in his mind, watches colors swim in the blackness behind his eyes, breathing slowly until the dark begins to take on a more defined quality. If he were prone to poetics he might call it the border of sleep.

Breathe in, breathe out. The magic of it, the magic thrumming in all things, everywhere; it washes over him like a wave on the sand.

Sand. Right. The beach at Gedref, the wind in his hair and the smell of salt. It begins to fall into place, replacing the darkness, piercing blue sky shooting through the black.

Arthur waits for him there. And, well, he looks pissed.

Merlin cringes as he sits down. “I was going to tell you, you know.”

“Were you?” Arthur’s not even trying to sound neutral. Bad sign. “I’d thought we were finished with keeping secrets.”

“I wasn’t keeping it secret, I was just…trying to think it through.”

“And you didn’t think I might like to _think it through_?”

“I didn’t—” Merlin hesitates, but there really is no better way to say it. “I didn’t want to give you false hope, all right? I didn’t want to bring it up if there was no chance of it working. What would’ve been the point?”

“The point is that I’m not a child,” Arthur says tersely. “I don’t pretend to be an expert in magic, that’s entirely your arena, but Mordred’s given this some thought. It sounds like it could actually work.”

Merlin knows, logically, that he’s already dreaming, but if he _didn’t_ know that then he would definitely be wondering. “How do you figure?”

Arthur gives him that look he gets when someone’s being purposely obtuse. “You can’t tell me you don’t see the sense. You’re just stalling because you know you don’t have a proper argument.”

“Since when did not trusting _Mordred_ become a poor argument?”

“What, then?” Arthur demands. “Are you going to ignore everything he says, even if it makes sense? I seem to recall you being fond of telling me to give people second chances. Does that no longer apply?”

He’s already asleep, he shouldn’t be this exhausted. “We’re going in circles. You know I can’t—”

“First,” Arthur cuts in, “you _won’t_ , and there is a difference. Second, that’s bull. Why would you teach him to use his magic if you really didn’t trust him? If you think he’s waiting to betray us at the first opportunity, then why let him stay? What was the point of any of it?”

“I don’t know!” Merlin bursts out. “I don’t…”

He puts his head in his hands with a groan. Everything’s gone mad, is the problem, and he’s not even certain he’s the only sane man anymore.

At length, Arthur sighs beside him. “You’re an idiot,” he says, and Merlin twitches. “But I know you’re not stupid. If you know someone’s going to stab you in the back, you don’t hand them the knife. You saw something else in Mordred.”

“Does it matter what I saw?” Merlin asks tiredly. “My instincts have been shit before.”

“That doesn't matter. All I know is, _my_ instinct told me Mordred was being genuine when he came here, and I believe he’s being genuine now. Yours is either telling you the same or it isn’t.”

Merlin is quiet for a minute, mulling that one over. Then he lifts his head back up.

“Can I ask—and I’m not trying to be an arse or anything, but—did your instinct say the same about Mordred back then? That he was…genuine?”

Arthur is looking out at the water. “It did,” he admits. “I never would have knighted him otherwise.” He pauses. “And I still believe it, you know. He only betrayed me because in his eyes I betrayed him first. He tried to kill me, but…I don’t think he ever lied to me.”

Merlin flinches. Arthur makes an aborted movement toward him before leaning back on the sand and cursing under his breath.

“You know I didn’t mean it like that.”

“I know.”

“But you do have this habit of keeping things from me when you think I can’t handle them, and it needs to stop. I thought it _had_ stopped.”

“It had, I swear, I just…” Merlin lies on his back and closes his eyes. It’s easier to talk about this kind of thing in the dark. “With Mordred around, I guess it all came screaming back. Old habits and all. _Really_ old habits.”

“Well, break them,” is the dry response. “If I were still your king, that’d be an order.”

“Because I was always so good at following those.”

Arthur snorts.

Merlin bites his lip. “It’s not that I think you can’t handle it,” he says. “It was never that. It was just that I didn’t want to force you to handle it, if that makes sense.”

“So your brilliant plan was to handle everything on your own?” Arthur says, sardonic. “Merlin, you really are an idiot.”

He cracks a smile. “So I’ve been told.”

“Clearly not enough.”

There’s a shifting from beside him, which means Arthur’s sitting up, so Merlin opens his eyes. Arthur is giving him a serious look.

“You realize it’s not the same now as it was then, don’t you?” he says quietly. “We’re in this together. We’re—partners, or whatever the hell it is they’re calling it now—”

“Oh, like business partners?” Merlin grins despite himself. “Careful Arthur, acknowledging it might actually cause you to break out in hives.”

Arthur’s gone pink, but he carries on with all the kingly dignity he can muster. God, but Merlin hasn’t wanted to kiss him this badly in a long time.

“ _Partners_. Shut up Merlin, my _point_ is that you don’t need to carry everything by yourself anymore. Honestly, that’s more likely to make me break out in hives than anything else.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Then stop doing it.”

“I know, I know. I will.” He takes a deep breath. “So you thinks Mordred deserves a shot, then?”

“I do. But you already knew that.”

Merlin rubs a hand over his eyes. “Yeah, I know I’m stalling again.”

“You know,” Arthur says carefully, “it wasn’t your fault the first time everything went to hell with Mordred. And it won’t be your fault now if we’re both wrong.”

“If you’re dead, it won’t matter whose fault it is,” Merlin replies, grim. Arthur’s eyes flicker to him and then away again.

“Maybe not. But we’ll both have walked into it with eyes open this time, won’t we?”

“I don’t know if I can live with that,” he says softly.

Arthur smiles a bit. “I think you’re going to have to learn. Even a great sorcerer can’t predict everything.”

Merlin’s heard that tone before. He knows the choice has been made whether he likes it or not.

And he’s not lofty enough to act like he wouldn’t forfeit a limb for them both to be human again, which he supposes means he’s made his choice as well.

He sighs. “Right, then. I guess I’ll—”

Suddenly he stills, the feeling of ice water trickling down his back.

_I sent him away._

Arthur’s gaze sharpens. “What is it?”

“Oh shit.” Merlin squeezes his eyes shut and tries to jerk himself awake. “I think I might’ve fucked up.”

.

He snaps out of his trance and immediately regrets it, miserably sore all over and sluggish like he’s just slept for a week. Or not slept for a week. Either way.

Merlin tries to jump out of bed and somehow ends up on the floor, knees and elbows burning. He can hear the raven cawing in concern but he can’t quite pinpoint where the noise is coming from. His vision is wavering.

With aching slowness, he picks himself up off the floor and staggers out of the bedroom, across the flat, toward the door. The raven lands on his shoulder, talons pricking through the fabric of his shirt in a comfortingly familiar way.

Now it’s just a matter of getting down the stairs without taking them all at once and breaking his neck. Should be simple, except that right now he’s seeing three staircases.

_Well, shit._

Merlin closes his eyes, because apparently vision isn’t going to help, and feels his way down the stairs. The raven _quorks_ whenever he’s about to make a misstep, which helps.

At the bottom, he fumbles with the doorknob. Wandering around the dreamscape messes with his perception of time, but the sun must be going down soon.

_Come on, come on—_

He shoves the door open and stumbles like a drunk into the back room, shouting Mordred’s name and getting no answer.

He thinks he’s probably still shouting it when he hits the floor, the world going abruptly sideways as his legs give out. Merlin wants to howl in frustration and he hasn’t even transformed yet. The sound of fluttering wings features heavily in his hearing.

From the floor, Merlin’s eye catches on a massive tome lying open on Mordred’s armchair, one he remembers containing an ancient map of Camelot. The map is gone; he only wishes he were surprised.

He must be passing out, given how dark his vision is getting. Fantastic. That is exactly what he needed today, thanks.

The raven takes flight again, hovering up near the ceiling above a window. Merlin squints.

There’s something wrong.

He can tell the bird is blurring like wet paint, the way they both do on that ever-elusive border between human and animal, but that’s not the odd thing. Merlin can’t feel his body changing the way he normally does, but that’s not it either.

It isn’t his vision fading out: The sky is dark. He can see it through the window—the sun has disappeared, leaving the sky black as if night has come already. But it can’t be night; there is no moon, although the sky is clear.

“What…?”

He drags a hand up to his eyes, tries to rub the sleep from them—is he hallucinating now? Is this going to be a thing?—and when he lowers it, the raven is gone.

In its place is the impossible.

Slowly, shaking, Merlin forces himself to sit up.

“Arthur?”


	10. Chapter 10

.

_They learn to accept the cycle. Sunup signals Arthur’s change into a raven, and when the sun goes down it’s Merlin’s turn. He’s some sort of dog—not certain what breed, not that it matters. When the sun comes up they start all over again._

_He thinks he understands it, at least to an extent. Magic abhors a vacuum. If he wants Arthur’s human form back, he must forfeit his own._

_Arthur rages for some time over it. He’s furious for weeks, months, and sometimes Merlin wonders why._

_Then he remembers the prince who was willing to swallow poison for the sake of his servant and he understands. Of course, he thinks, Arthur ought to remember that Merlin had drunk poison for him first. This has always gone two ways._

_Eventually he gives up and starts biting Arthur’s hand whenever he looks like he’s getting too mopey. It makes him feel better, at least._

_And so it goes._

_There are years, and years, too many for Merlin to remember them all. They cut ties to the life they knew and don’t look back; it’s the only way this is going to work without either of them going mad. They travel instead. He collects spells and stories from those he finds, druids and hedgewitches and wandering sorcerers._

_None of them work. The magic of the Sidhe, it seems, is stronger than anything human magic can produce to counter it. In hindsight, it was incredibly lucky that he’d managed to find as big a loophole in the curse as he had._

_Once, in desperation, he calls on Kilgharrah. He tries over and over again, shouting to the winds in the dragon’s tongue, but there is no reply, and he knows what has happened. There may not have been much love lost between Merlin and the old dragon, but he still mourns. He mourns the loss of one more piece of their old life._

_Merlin does learn a few things over time, however. The most important being that the raven shows no signs of aging, of slowing down, and the day he realizes this is the day a massive weight eases from his chest._

_He’s known for some time that he doesn’t age like other people do; it’s half the reason they never stop moving for long. He lived a long time haunted by the horrible certainty that someday Arthur would die, of old age if nothing else, and then what would he do?_

_He’s not even sure if he could take his own life. Would the earth and its magic, all those things Balinor told him he was bound to, allow him that relief?_

_But the raven remains hale and hearty—as hearty as an irritable human-turned-bird can be, anyway—and that’s enough for him. Merlin tries not to question it, but he does remember the Sidhe elder’s promise._

_“He will live,” he had said, and Arthur does. He lives and lives._

_It’s one less thing to worry about, at least._

_Years and years and years. Time whirls around them; faces come and go, and Merlin feels as if he is standing still even as he moves across the country, across the continent, beyond, the raven always at his side._

.

.

It’s pouring rain, which aside from being a monumental cliché means no one is around to stop Mordred from running headlong into the forest, an ancient and probably priceless map tucked under his jacket.

The trees at least provide some cover from the rain, so he pulls the map out and squints at it, trying to remember what Arthur had told him. Trying to remember how the hell to read a map in the first place.

The darkness is rising, and Mordred’s anxiety is rising right along with it.

 _There_ , he thinks, eyes finding that faint blue spot on the map. He starts running again and hopes he’s got the direction right.

_Please, please—_

It’s a soundless prayer, nothing he hasn’t done a hundred times before. But what if fate or luck or whatever doesn’t answer him this time? What if he’s just running in circles? What if he doesn’t recognize the signs of a cloaked magical pocket when he stumbles across it?

 _You can’t fuck this up,_ Mordred tells himself over and over. _You’ve fucked up everything else, but this needs to work. You have to make it work._

And that’s when he slams into the wall.

It’s not until Mordred is stumbling, fighting the rising tide of nausea, that he realizes there’s no wall anywhere in sight. Which makes sense, seeing as he’s in a bloody _forest_.

But there’s definitely something, and it’s making him feel like he’s about to be sick.

 _Concentrate_. He forces himself to focus through the roiling in his stomach. There isn’t a physical wall, no, but hadn’t Merlin said the Sidhe, whoever they were, had cloaked themselves as some kind of defense mechanism? What better way to tell all of humanity—or at least magically inclined humanity—to fuck off than by making them bring up their dinner whenever they got too close?

_See, Merlin, I told you there’d be sensing involved._

The giddiness of discovery lasts about two seconds. There’s still the question of breaking the wall. Mordred’s played enough video games to know you’re supposed to go for the foundations, bring the whole thing down from the very stones it was built on, but there’s nothing like that here.

Seconds tick by while his heart pounds. The sky has gone completely black. The eclipse has started already, throwing everything into darkness, and eclipses never last long. Mordred knows he’s running out of time.

They all are.

Panic threatens to cut off his air supply; Mordred closes his eyes and struggles to regain his focus.

_Visualize what you want your magic to do._

_I want it to rip this wall down,_ he thinks. _But I don’t know where the wall even is._

_Then find it. Feel around, like you did when you first woke your magic on purpose._

_Right. Okay. I can work with that._ He breathes slowly, evenly. Tries to forget about the ticking clock and the cold rain trickling down his back.

His magic responds more readily than it used to, ease coming with practice, he supposes. Mordred tries to nudge it outside of himself, searching for something else like it. Something he can latch onto.

His eyes fly open as a shock runs through him, like he’s just stuck his finger in a socket. _Holy **shit**. So this is what it feels like when magic users actually know what they’re doing._

But there’s no time right now to marvel. Mordred raises his hand—and then drops it.

He doesn’t have a spell.

The realization makes him colder than the rain’s been able to; he remembers with the sudden, horrible clarity of panic: Merlin saying he might be able to dig up a spell to break the barrier, if he could just find the barrier first. Well, Mordred’s gone and found it.

And now he has no way of breaking it.

 _Okay, okay, don’t panic. Not panicking._ Maybe he can just—

Just _what_? He’s fourteen. He doesn’t have a fucking clue what he’s doing.

“ _Shit_!” he screams, giving in to frustration. Unbelievable. He’s _this close_ and now he can’t finish the job?

 _Get a hold of yourself_ , the reasonable little voice in his head snaps. _Spells direct the magic, remember? They don’t make it appear or disappear. They just funnel it to its purpose._

 _Exactly!_ Mordred snaps back—and apparently he’s finally cracked, the crazy boy arguing with himself in the middle of the woods, but he’s got too much else on his mind right now to be overly concerned. _I need the control, look what happened when I let loose without it!_

_You blew up your room._

_Yes,_ Mordred thinks irritably, _I blew up my room._

_Sort of like how you want to blow up this magical wall right now?_

_Like—_ Mordred’s eyes widen. _Oh. **Oh**._

_Yes. ‘Oh’._

There’s no time to waste. Mordred lifts his hand again. He closes his eyes.

It’s not going to be like how it was before, when all his magic wanted was to escape and wreak havoc. Mordred had let it; he hadn’t known what else to do, then. He’d been scared.

He can’t be scared now.

 _Go on,_ he thinks, feeling the magic stir hopefully somewhere inside him. _You wanted to run wild, right?_

_So do it._

And apparently his magic doesn’t need to be told twice, because that’s when the world explodes.

.

.

Arthur’s had this dream before.

It’s not the dreamscape, or whatever Merlin calls it; Arthur’s true dreams never take place on a beach. They don’t even feature Camelot anymore, at least not nearly as often as they used to.

Instead they begin so normally Arthur would be hard-pressed to identify them as dreams early on. They usually start in the flat, or in the bookshop, or even on the street where he runs at night when no one else will bother him. Things will feel normal.

He’ll turn around, and Merlin will be there, hale and whole and human, only Arthur won’t be seeing it through a bird’s eyes.

He’ll turn around and—

It doesn’t matter what happens next, really. All the important things are established in the first ten seconds.

The strange thing is that no matter how many variations his mind creates out of the same situation, he never realizes he’s dreaming. Not until he wakes up, maybe perched on something improbable or maybe with the dog snoring softly in the background somewhere, at which point he begins to halfheartedly wish it were possible to pull his brain out of his ears when he tries to sleep.

Over time he’s begun to understand why Merlin refused to sleep for days, all those years ago. Even good dreams turn to nightmares when reality flat-out refuses to equal them.

Arthur tells himself that it’s no different this time. Except that he’s apparently figured out how to know when he’s dreaming. That’s a step up, he supposes.

They’re in the bookshop, which isn’t unusual. The sky is dark, no moonlight in it, turning the room into little more than a collection of shadows with stray beams of streetlights streaking in, but it doesn’t matter. Merlin is Merlin is Merlin, and he’s sitting on the floor with his mouth hanging open like an idiot.

Typical, really. He never did have a sense of ceremony, and Arthur supposes his mental image of Merlin is no exception.

“You look ridiculous,” he says, just to say something.

Merlin is still gaping, blue eyes wide. Arthur frowns. Real or imagined, this is usually the point at which Merlin says something he thinks is witty in response to Arthur’s assessment of his character. Yet nothing seems forthcoming.

Arthur tries again. It’s an odd sensation, trying to manipulate a dream when you know you’re in one. “I realize I’ve made a point of telling you to shut up more or less constantly, but now that I think about it, the whole silence thing doesn’t suit you. It’s actually rather unnerving.”

Mechanically, Merlin begins to pinch himself in the arm. Arthur is beginning to worry. Maybe he _has_ wandered into the dreamscape thing somehow. Maybe he’s broken it. God, Merlin would never let him hear the end of it.

“Listen—” It becomes clear that Merlin’s gaze has shifted, going to a point somewhere over Arthur’s shoulder, which feels disproportionately annoying. “What is so fascinating?”

He doesn’t wait for an answer, turning around instead to see for himself.

At first Arthur doesn’t understand. Outside of the window, above the city lights, the sky is pitch-black. The moon is nowhere to be seen—hiding behind a cloud, most likely, Arthur’s not overly concerned—

But then he sees it:

The pitch-black sphere where the moon—the sun?—ought to be, a gaping hole ripped from the fabric of the sky.

_The eclipse._

Arthur’s mouth goes dry.

He’s almost afraid to turn around again, afraid that Merlin will have somehow disappeared while his eyes were elsewhere—vanished like every other dream Arthur’s had.

But he isn’t. He’s there, and he’s standing, supporting himself against the arm of a chair, and suddenly Arthur has no idea what to do with his hands.

“Is this—” Merlin’s voice sounds like he’s been swallowing sandpaper. He clears his throat. “Are we—”

“I don’t know,” Arthur interrupts. His heart feels like it’s trying to crawl up out of his mouth. “Does it matter?”

If this is a dream, Arthur realizes, he doesn’t care. _He doesn’t care_.

There is a room between them. Merlin crosses it in three strides, all unsteadiness gone, and has flung his arms around Arthur’s neck before he has any time to react, face buried in Arthur’s shoulder.

He freezes for an instant. If he touches this and it shatters, he thinks he’s going to go a bit mad after all.

Merlin is trembling, though. He can feel it—shaking so hard Arthur’s surprised he can’t hear his teeth rattling. It knocks loose some long-useless instinct that has Arthur putting his arms around him before he can think anymore about what that might mean.

They breathe. Merlin doesn’t shatter.

Well, he’s always been stronger than he looks.

Merlin’s spine is bent, like he’s trying to fold himself into all of Arthur’s empty spaces, which makes it easier for him to press his mouth to Merlin’s hair. Close his burning eyes and inhale.

He doesn’t know how long they stand there, clinging to each other like drowning men to a life preserver. Eventually he finds his voice again.

“Still here?”

Merlin huffs a laugh against his neck. It’s shaky and clogged with tears and it’s the best damn thing Arthur’s heard in a long time.

“Still here,” Merlin says.

They got seven minutes last time, Arthur remembers. He doesn’t know how long they have now, but he finds he doesn’t really care about that, either.

After all, his kingdom and those he loved within it are long gone. Seven minutes is far more than he ever expected to feel again of home.

.

.

It feels like there should be dust settling when Mordred opens his eyes again, or something equally dramatic, but there isn’t any.

Just a huge lake that hadn’t been there thirty seconds ago.

Because, you know. This is Mordred’s life now.

Even with the proven track record of crazy he’s got under his belt at this point, he still has to blink a good ten times before he accepts he’s actually seeing what he’s seeing: A lake that spreads for miles, dark blue and still enough that its surface looks like glass. If moonlight were hitting it, though, it would sparkle—like something vibrant, something ancient and youthful and utterly _alive_.

Mordred doesn’t know how he knows this.

Far out in the center of the lake stands an island with a dilapidated stone tower, and something small bobbing in the water nearby—a boat? Maybe a bier?

Mordred shivers. This place is silent, he realizes, free of any birdsong or animal chatter. Even the rain has stopped, almost like it’s afraid to disturb the perfect stillness of Avalon.

It takes him three tries, clearing his throat again each time, to manage a “Hello?”

The sound doesn’t echo back; it’s like the lake swallows it. His voice is absorbed with no answer given in exchange.

“I’m here to ask a favor from the Sidhe,” Mordred tries. _Maybe they only respond to people who talk like something out of a period drama._

Still nothing. The lake is as silent as the proverbial grave.

Mordred is struck by the sudden, terrifying thought that maybe he’s wandered into a pocket not of magic, but of time—somehow stumbled on a place that only exists, frozen, two thousand years ago. What if he can’t get back? What if he’s trapped here, the Sidhe long since died off, nothing but him and the silence for the rest of his life?

_Has it ever crossed your mind that maybe you’ve read too many science fiction novels?_

Arthur’s voice in his head has no reason to be reassuring, calming even, but it is.

Mordred exhales slowly. Tries once more.

“I need your help,” he says.

“And why should we grant favors to you, Arthur’s Bane?”

The voice is cold, and ancient, and maybe a little amused, so Mordred isn’t as surprised as he should be when he turns around and sees—

_A fairy?_

Something tells him he’ll get blasted to kingdom come if he says it, so he clamps his mouth shut. Besides, the little blue creature with the icy eyes doesn’t seem like the wand-waving type.

“Has your tongue shriveled in your head?” the fairy—the Sidhe wants to know. “A moment ago you couldn’t cease using it.”

Mordred forces himself to unfreeze. “I came to ask a favor.”

“Yes, as you said before. And what favor might that be?”

“I want—” Mordred swallows. There’s something about the air in here. “I want you to remove a curse you set.”

The Sidhe looks unimpressed. “We have not laid a curse in many, many years. You are mistaken.”

“No, I’m not. I’m talking about the curse you put on Arthur and Merlin when they came to you for help.”

It’s not until the twist of the Sidhe’s mouth changes that Mordred realizes it has, up to now, been smiling. Or smirking.

“Emrys,” he growls. “Even now he finds new ways to torment us.”

 _Merlin_ , the voice in his head whispers. Mordred can’t help himself. “Can you blame him? You turned the love of his life into a _bird_.”

“Yes, and we have witnessed his feeble attempts to undo his own foolishness,” sneers the Sidhe. “Trying to forswear his oath, as if it were a thing so easily broken. Trying to alter the terms of our bargain on his own—forfeiting his own form in the process! Emrys is a fool. He has long since lost the right to beg favors from us.”

“But _Emrys_ isn’t asking,” Mordred points out, trying to stay calm. “I am.”

The Sidhe gives him a considering look. “True. Yet you still haven’t told us why we should listen.”

Mordred has the definite feeling he’s going to regret asking. “What do you want?”

“What we _desire_ , what we have long desired, is to be left in peace by foolish humans who cannot solve their own problems.”

“But this isn’t their problem!” Mordred bursts out. “It never was! They didn’t _ask_ to be like this, haven’t they suffered enough?”

“Emrys asked for his king’s life, and so his king’s life was given. If he wished more from the bargain he need only have said. Yet he did not, and we are not to blame if he finds himself dissatisfied with the outcome.” The Sidhe’s tone is dismissive. “Leave now. We are in need of new borders, it would seem.”

He turns his back as Mordred stands there in disbelief. In all honesty, he never thought he’d actually find Avalon. He hadn’t planned this far ahead. Merlin was right; he’s a child to them. He can’t outtalk an ancient fairy.

_But I can’t just let it end here!_

His reasonable little voice answers, only it doesn’t sound so reasonable anymore: _No. I can’t._

Something strange happens then.

Mordred speaks, but the words are not his own.

“Do you know who I am?”

The Sidhe pauses, turns back to face him but says nothing.

“I think you do. You called me by a very old name,” Mordred continues. “But do you know who I _am_?”

There is a twist to the Sidhe’s features, an expression he can’t name. “You are the empty shell of one once great. Do you seek to threaten us, as Emrys once did? Make no mistake, boy, we sensed your presence in this world the moment you returned to it. We thought perhaps—” His lip curls over pointy teeth. “Yet you are weak now. You have lost the power you once wielded, and you are no threat to us.”

“You forget yourself,” Mordred murmurs. “I _am_ Arthur’s Bane. Don’t you remember what that means?”

His voice hardens into stone. “It means I killed King Arthur, the greatest of kings. I drove a dragon-forged sword through his heart and he kneeled at my feet. I outwitted Emrys, the greatest sorcerer ever to walk the earth. All of his powers and prescience could not stop me then, and now…” A shrug. “Now he has taught me everything I know. Would you call that irony?”

“You lie,” the Sidhe snarls.

“As easily as I breathe,” says Mordred agreeably. “But not in this. And not when I say I will burn your sanctuary to ashes if you refuse me.”

“I have lived longer than the very earliest of men, boy, do you think I do not recognize a bluff when I hear one?” the Sidhe snaps, but there is a flicker of fear in those cold eyes.

Mordred reaches out and speaks the first spell Merlin ever taught him:

“ _Forbearnan_.”

The flames erupt from his palm just as they did the last time, spiraling out faster than any natural fire would, an ever-growing pinwheel of orange and red so close to spinning out of control and burning everything down around his ears.

But they won’t, he knows. Not this time.

Not unless he tells them to.

The fire builds higher and higher, scraping the sky in moments, or at least it seems that way from the ground. Something about the sight makes him dizzy, something like vertigo; Mordred knows, with a sudden cold certainty, that if he wished it, he could burn the water from the deepest reaches of Avalon. He could turn this place of legend into nothing more than parched earth and dust motes on the wind.

He could, but would he?

Maybe the voice speaking through him now, that voice that speaks down through the millennia, would have the ability to grit his teeth and do what needs to be done, but Mordred isn’t so sure. What is he willing to part with for the sake of his friends? How much of his soul is he willing to sacrifice?

For now, at least, he won’t need to know.

“Enough,” the Sidhe bellows. Mordred is startled to see sweat shining on its blue face.

Carefully, slowly, he allows the flames to die down. It’s almost as if they disappear into his skin, as if he’s simply holding them somewhere inside for the next time they might be needed.

“We will grant you this favor,” the Sidhe says, acidic. “Yet we would have something in return.”

 _You mean something other than **not** burning this place to the ground?_ In the spirit of reconciliation, he doesn’t say it. His words are his own again.

“What do you want? And if you could be a little more straightforward this time, that’d be great.”

“We would have a promise from you. Sworn on blood and magic.”

More and more suspicious. Great. “Let’s hear it, then.”

The Sidhe’s eyes narrow. “Swear that you will never again set foot on Avalon’s shores after this day. And swear to your silence—you will never tell a soul, living or dead, where the lake stands or how to find it. Swear, and we will end our bargain with Emrys and his king.”

Mordred thinks it over. “Fine.”

Nodding in what’s probably supposed to be a gracious way, the Sidhe produces a knife from nowhere and offers it to Mordred. He takes it.

It’s a small thing, and fine, and it cuts into his forearm like butter. Not that he really wants to make a habit out of this whole blood bargain nonsense, but if it’s going to become a _thing_ , Mordred thinks he’d definitely choose fairy blades over, say, a kitchen knife. Just as an observation.

The cut is small, but the blood wells up quickly to spill on the ground between them. The soil drinks it up thirstily. Mordred supposes it hasn’t had much to drink over the last few centuries, if blood is what it prefers.

He takes a deep breath to steady himself. _Here we go_.

“I swear I will never set foot in Avalon after today. I also swear that I will never tell another soul, living or dead—” Seems an odd distinction to make, really, but then he is speaking to fairies. “—where the lake is or how to get to it.

“But,” he adds quickly, and sees the Sidhe twitch. “I’m adding a condition. The former king Arthur and the warlock Emrys, called Merlin, must be immediately freed from any and all bargains previously made with the Sidhe. They must have their original, _human_ forms permanently returned to them. If this condition isn’t met, then the oath I’ve just sworn will not hold. This I also swear.”

“You overreach,” hisses the Sidhe.

“Maybe,” Mordred answers; his heart is going about a million miles a minute, a crazed bird fluttering inside of his ribcage, but he’s proud to say that his voice stays even. “But every word I said will hold, I’m sure about that. So as long as everybody holds up their end of the deal, we shouldn’t have a problem.”

He smiles. And wonders, distantly, if he’s about to be turned into a greasy smear on the ground.

Deep down, though, he knows there’s nothing the Sidhe can do. His blood is drying, soaking into the earth; Avalon itself has accepted his conditions, and the Sidhe are only its inhabitants, not its rulers. They’re bound to the will of its magic just as Mordred is. Just as Arthur and Merlin have been.

The Sidhe speaks, and his tone is bitter. “Very well. It will be as you say.” There is a glimmer in his eyes. “To be outmaneuvered by a human again, after all these years…you may truly be a worthy heir to Emrys.”

And _that_ , well. Mordred has to make a face. “Arthur’s Bane, Emrys’ Heir…honestly, I think you’re all way too fond of epithets. I’m Mordred. That’s all I’ve ever been.”

 _And I have finally been redeemed_ , the voice in his head murmurs. But it isn’t his, Mordred realizes. It never has been.

Still, he can feel when it vanishes—lifted on the wind just like the invisible weight has been from his chest.


	11. Chapter 11

.

_There’s a question that nags at him sometimes, and it’s not until the nineteenth century that he works up the courage to ask it._

_“Do you ever wonder what it might’ve been like if we’d never met?”_

_Arthur looks at him like he’s an idiot. Or maybe that’s just his default expression when Merlin is talking._

_“No. Do you?”_

_Merlin looks away. “Sometimes.”_

_He can feel Arthur staring at him for some time after that, his eyes boring holes into the side of Merlin’s head. It’s a small relief when he looks back to the sky._

_“What have you come up with?”_

_“Hm?”_

_Arthur waves his hand. “In this strange alternate reality where I never tried to take your head off in broad daylight. What happens to us?”_

_“Well...” Merlin decides to try for levity. “I would have a lot less bruises from getting things thrown at me, for one.”_

_“Somehow I doubt it.”_

_“You think everyone is as unpleasant to their servants as you were?” Merlin teases._

_Arthur doesn’t take the bait, though. When Merlin looks over he’s frowning, like he’s trying to work something out._

_“I can’t do it,” he says at last. “Because in every version of this other lifetime you’re talking about, I’m dead inside of a week.”_

_Merlin feels himself flushing. “I didn’t save your life **that** often.”_

_“Didn’t you?”_

_“You saved mine too,” he points out. “Plenty of times.”_

_“There you go, then. We’d both be dead inside of a week.”_

_“Unless—”_

_Merlin bites off the sentence before it can go any farther, but it’s too late._

_“Unless what?”_

_“Unless…unless we’d have been in less danger, you know. If we’d been apart.” He can’t bring himself to look over. “I mean, think about it. Morgana might never have gone to Morgause if I hadn’t poisoned her. And Mordred—”_

_“Made his choice,” Arthur cuts in, voice tight. “So did Morgana, so did we all. Arrogance doesn’t suit you, Merlin. Stop trying to take credit for everyone’s terrible decisions.”_

_“I wasn’t—”_

_Arthur interrupts again. “You want to know what I really think? If we’d never met, I never would have married Guinevere. I never would have knighted Lancelot or Gwaine or Percival. I never would have become the man that I did.”_

_“You don’t give yourself enough credit,” Merlin says, his face still hot. “You would’ve done all that anyway. It’s who you are.”_

_“Maybe. Or maybe I would have been an awful king and history would’ve forgotten me completely. And this is all assuming that I was still alive to take the throne in the first place which, considering what you’ve told me about your exploits, seems unlikely.”_

_Merlin stares at the sky until the blue begins to hurt his eyes._

_“I never said it would’ve been better,” he says finally. “I just wonder sometimes…what it **would** have been like.”_

_“Wonder all you like. But not if it’s only going to be an exercise in self-punishment.” Arthur hesitates. “For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t want it.”_

_“Want what?”_

_“Your other lifetime. I don’t care if I live to be a hundred years old in it, it’s not worth the trade.”_

_Merlin finally looks over. Arthur is looking at him, grinning a bit. His eyes are very blue._

_“Even if your stupidity does cause me physical pain on a daily basis,” he adds._

_Merlin uses magic to dump a load of sand on his head. He listens to Arthur sputter and doesn’t feel guilty at all._

.

.

Merlin opens his eyes to sunlight filling the room and Arthur, still warm and real and solid.

Still human.

They’re both still human.

Arthur is staring at him with wide eyes.

“You haven’t done anything magical, have you? We’re not—?”

“No.” A faint prick of guilt. “I haven’t done anything.”

“So this is real, then.”

Behind him, Merlin can see the sun, in the sky like it’s supposed to be. “I think so.”

Arthur exhales shakily, nods like he’s thinking it over. “Right. Good. Because there’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time.”

Merlin opens his mouth to say something inane, probably, but he doesn’t manage it because Arthur is kissing him, and for a moment all he can think is _we can’t touch here, if this is the dreamscape we can’t touch, we can’t—_

But they are.

They are.

_This is real._

He closes his eyes and kisses back, and it feels like centuries falling away.

It seems like a long while later when they break apart, foreheads resting together, breathing slow.

“He must have done it,” Arthur murmurs. “Mordred. There’s no other explanation.”

The guilt returns, more of a stab now than a prickling. Merlin cringes.

“I sent him away,” he admits. “I—I told him to go home. If he’d listened to me, we’d still be…”

“Suppose it’s a good thing he’s more stubborn than you, then,” Arthur says with a smile. “We should find him.”

Merlin nods. He’s got a feeling he’s going to need all of his words to sort out what to say to Mordred once they find him.

Arthur turns to leave, but Merlin catches his sleeve.

He turns back, questioning.

“It’s good to see you,” Merlin says. It’s not everything he wants to say, not even close, but it’s a start.

A smile spreads over Arthur’s face, and for a second Merlin would swear he shines brighter than the sun.

.

.

Getting out of Avalon is easier than getting into it; it’s like the forest has finally decided to stop screwing with him. Mordred appreciates this, because as it is, he stumbles out of the trees feeling like something’s been scooped out of him.

 _Maybe I didn’t think this whole ‘blood bargain’ thing through_ , he muses, stumbling back toward civilization. He’d managed to tear a strip from his shirt to use as a makeshift tourniquet—which is harder than it looks in the movies, thanks very much—but he still feels lightheaded and woozy and he’s not sure how he’s going to get home. This is probably why amateurs shouldn’t be slicing themselves open willy-nilly.

_One foot in front of the other. Just keep putting one foot in front of the other._

The sun is hanging low in the sky, the eclipse well and truly over. It’s too bad Ms. Fray probably wouldn’t accept a paper on eclipses having the ability to form loopholes in previously unbreakable curses, because Mordred’s pretty pleased with himself for figuring that one out. Assuming it worked.

Well, he’ll be able to go back and give the Sidhe hell if it didn't, so there’s that.

His sight is starting to go dark around the edges the longer he walks. Mordred wonders how concerned he should be about that, his vision narrowing to a fuzzy point somewhere straight ahead.

_Maybe I ought to be finding a hospital instead._

Mordred’s feet find tarmac, and that’s when he hears Arthur’s voice.

“Mordred?”

It’s distant. Mordred stops moving and squints, trying to find where he is.

“Mordred, _move_!”

Merlin that time, but Mordred doesn’t have time to feel surprised because there’s fear in Merlin’s voice, and what the hell…

The too-loud honking of a horn from somewhere to his right; Mordred turns just in time to see the front of a lorry far closer to his face than he’d like it to be.

_Well, fuck._

Not exactly an inspiring last thought, that.

For the second time in as many hours, Mordred feels like he’s run into a solid wall. The collision knocks him backward.

His head hits the ground harder than the rest of him, an explosion of light and pain behind his eyelids, but he isn’t dead—at least, he doesn’t think he’s dead. Is pretty sure dying isn’t supposed to hurt this much.

Somewhere ahead he sees a tall, skinny figure lowering its arm. It’s hazy, but he thinks he sees gold glimmering in its eyes.

Then darkness sweeps in, drowning the gold and everything else and dragging Mordred’s consciousness down with it.

.

.

He wakes up to a white ceiling and white walls, which causes Mordred to panic for a second because oh shit, the government has found him and decided to turn him into a military experiment after all—

“Stop panicking,” someone says, and Mordred turns sideways with some effort.

Merlin is sitting in a fold-out chair next to the bed, looking amused. And also…

“You look like shit,” Mordred croaks, startling a laugh out of Merlin.

“Overdid it a bit,” he admits. “Also, speak for yourself.”

“Everything hurts,” Mordred informs him. “Like, _everything_. Did I actually just get hit by a truck?”

“If you’d been hit by that thing, you’d be considerably less chatty than you are now.”

Mordred stares. “So you did save me.”

“Concussed you, more like,” Merlin says. “Sorry about that, by the way. I sort of…panicked. Threw you backwards. I didn’t mean for you to end up in hospital over it.”

“Think I’d’ve ended up in the morgue instead if you hadn’t,” Mordred replies, a shudder running through him. Shit, he almost _died_ today. That hadn’t been on his to-do list. “Thanks, erm. For saving my life.”

Merlin’s mouth goes all tight, like it does when Mordred’s about to get lectured on the finer points of Dewey or magic.

“I should be thanking you, not the other way around.”

“What?”

“You don’t—” Merlin stops. “Mordred, it’s the middle of the night.”

“Yeah…?”

Merlin raises his eyebrows. It takes a second, but Mordred twigs. He feels his jaw drop.

“Holy _shit_ , you’re—”

“Human.” Merlin smiles wryly. “One hundred percent.”

It had worked. It had actually worked.

Mordred asks the first question that comes to mind. “Where’s Arthur?”

“He said he was going to find a vending machine, but I suspect he’s actually harassing the nurses, trying to find out when you’re allowed out of here. He was worried, you know.”

“Huh.” His face is getting warm. “Guess that’s nice of—”

“I told you to move,” Merlin interrupts. “Why didn’t you?”

Told him—oh, yeah, Mordred does sort of remember that. He frowns. “What, you mean when the _lorry_ was inches from my face? Sorry for not being at my best there, it was kind of a confusing time.”

“I told you before, I don’t have time to teach someone who isn’t going to listen to a word I say.”

Mordred tries to scowl, but he’s too tired to manage more than a halfhearted glare. “Funny, I thought you didn’t want me around anyway. Or did I imagine that?”

“You’re right. I didn’t.” Merlin takes a deep breath. “But I was wrong.”

Mordred blinks. Clearly the concussion is causing him to imagine things. “You what?”

“I was wrong. I thought—I thought I was protecting us, I thought I was doing the right thing, keeping you at arm’s length, but all I was doing was fucking up again. And I’m sorry.”

“It’s not a big deal,” Mordred says uncomfortably, but Merlin shakes his head.

“It is, though. It’s…everything.”

They sit in silence for a minute, Mordred trying to find the words he wants.

“I’ve been wondering for a while now, how I’m supposed to feel guilty about something I don’t remember doing,” he says finally. “And I mean, you might not’ve been wrong, not completely. Maybe I was—maybe I _do_ have some connection to your Mordred.” The words feel strange on his tongue. He bites his lip.

“But it doesn’t mean I _am_ him. Like you—you’re not exactly the Merlin I read about in storybooks, you know?” Merlin nods, mouth twisting up. “So I guess I’m wondering, what’s it matter who I ‘used’ to be?” He pulls a face. “Honestly, I’ve got enough shit of my own to work out. I don't need to borrow anyone else’s.”

“A lesson some of us could still stand to learn,” Arthur says dryly from the door.

Merlin turns to look at him, and the look on his face is…well, it’s embarrassing, is what it is, because Mordred’s still sitting _right here_. But he can’t quite get over the shock of seeing them both in the same room in time to make a scathing remark.

“Feeling more like the living?” Arthur asks, coming to stand beside the bed.

“A bit,” Mordred answers. “Think your boyfriend knocked the shit out of me pretty good, though.”

Arthur nods. “He does that. I spent years being conveniently knocked out whenever he wanted to do something idiotic without my seeing it.”

“Pretty sure you got yourself knocked out plenty without my help,” Merlin interrupts.

“I am a knight, I’ll have you know, which means I’m graceful enough not to brain myself on whatever happens to be handy—”

“Oh _please_ , you are the single most danger-prone person I’ve ever had the misfortune to meet—”

“Says the person who picked a fight with a group of armed men the minute he entered Camelot?”

“You two are _disgusting_ ,” Mordred cuts in, disbelieving. They pause in their banter to look at him in confusion. “Honestly, I think I’m starting to get why the Sidhe cursed you, because this is sickening. At least stop smiling when you’re trying to argue, would you?”

Merlin coughs. He looks like he’s going to say something when a nurse pokes her head into the room.

“Mr. Emrys? I wondered if you could answer some questions for me?”

He seems only too happy to stumble up out of his chair and hover in the doorframe, talking quietly with the nurse. Arthur wastes no time in stealing his seat, leaning forward with an oddly strained look on his face.

“I wonder,” he says under his breath, like he doesn’t want Merlin hearing, “if you could tell me your exact words when you dealt with the Sidhe?”

“Erm. Maybe, why?”

“Just curious about something.”

Mordred has a bad feeling, but he digs around his memory a bit and comes up with the words he spoke at the lake. Arthur’s expression hasn’t cleared by the time he’s finished.

“Our original forms,” he murmurs.

“That’s right,” Mordred says cautiously. “Did…did I do something wrong?”

Arthur looks up and smiles. “No. You’ve done more than we could’ve asked, and I’m grateful for it. More than you know.” The smile turns wry. “As is Merlin, even if he won’t say it out loud.”

“Wasn’t expecting it,” Mordred replies. “Pretty sure he’s the most stubborn person I’ve ever met.”

“Can’t argue with you there.” Arthur gives him a contemplative look. “Although lately I’m starting to wonder if he’s found some competition.”

“I’ve been living with my competition for years,” Merlin informs them, returning from his little conference with the nurse. “Don’t think for a second I don’t realize you’ve been acting on your best behavior because you want to be some kind of role model, Arthur.”

“Your lack of confidence pains me.”

Merlin thoroughly ignores him, turning instead back to Mordred. “Looks like there’s no real damage, but she said they want you to stay overnight, just in case.”

“Oh. Right.” Not that he’s thrilled about the prospect of staying in this creepy white room by himself all night, but whatever—he’s faced down the wrath of blue fairies today, Mordred thinks he can handle a hospital room.

Merlin hesitates. “They called your mother.”

Ice water in his stomach. Maybe it’s the concussion, but Mordred suddenly feels very much like he wants to throw up. “Oh.”

“She’s on her way.” An uncomfortable shuffling of feet. “There was nothing we could say without making the whole thing seem…odd.”

When Mordred doesn’t say anything, Arthur steps in.

“You can’t hide from her forever,” he says quietly. “You knew you had to go home eventually.”

“I don’t—”

“You can control it now,” Merlin cuts in. “And anyway, you remember what I told you about self-preservation instinct overriding anything else your magic might ‘want’ to do?”

Mutely, Mordred nods.

Merlin smiles. “That goes for the people you love too, you know. Your magic is an extension of yourself; it’s not malicious. It can’t do anything if you really don’t want it to. And being afraid of yourself all the time is—it’s exhausting.”

“How can I _not_ be afraid of myself? Knowing what I can do?” Mordred can hear the desperation in his own voice, never a good sign.

“I realize how hypocritical this is going to sound, coming from me, but at some point you really do just need to trust yourself. Trust that you love her enough not to hurt her, not to lose control.” His eyes flicker to Arthur, whether he means them to or not. “You’d be surprised at how easy it is then.”

Mordred thinks he sort of understands. At least enough to know that Arthur’s right—he can’t keep running away.

After all, he now knows how to control an inferno in the palm of his hand. That’s got to count for something. At the very least, it’s bloody cool, isn’t it?

Arthur puts a steady hand on Mordred’s shoulder as he gets up to leave, which is reassuring even if Mordred’s fairly sure his mother could kick Arthur’s arse six ways to Sunday, immortal or no. They leave together and then it’s just silence. Mordred stares at the wall so hard he fancies he could put holes through it.

Which—oh yeah, he could do that now, too. If he wanted to.

But he doesn’t, and not just because it’d mean paying for damages. The drywall hasn’t done anything to him. He’s ended up here thanks to his own stupidity and bad choices, and maybe a couple of good ones, and the upshot of it all is that he’s starting to think maybe he isn’t dangerous by default. He can be, yeah, but only if he chooses to be.

Which he guesses isn’t all that different from anybody else, really.

Maybe he can do this. Maybe he can _be_ this without it making him crazy, or a monster, or—

“Mordred?”

He feels his body go rigid.

But he also feels something tight in his chest loosen all of a sudden, because he knows bone-deep that he would never hurt her. Just like he never would have turned that magic-fire on the Sidhe back in Avalon.

_How do you feel guilty about something you don’t remember doing?_

_You don’t,_ he thinks fiercely. _And then you don’t fucking do it again._

Slowly, he turns to face the doorway.

“Mum?” It comes out shaky and oh hell, he’s crying, isn’t he? Like a little kid. Mortifying.

She’s across the room in two steps and then he’s saying “I’m sorry, I’m sorry” into her shoulder over and over and she’s petting his hair and murmuring “It’s all right, Mordred, it’s all right.”

.

.

They make it all the way back to the bookshop before Merlin rounds on him, which Arthur supposes is better than he’d been expecting.

“What were you getting at?” His eyes glint in the darkness of the shop. “In the hospital, I mean. Asking what Mordred said to the Sidhe?”

Arthur doesn’t pretend not to know what he’s talking about.

“I’m going to die, aren’t I?”

The words hang between them in the ringing silence.

“I don’t know,” Merlin says at last. “The bargain I made called for your life, that was the whole point. But Mordred’s ended it, so I don’t know…”

His voice trails off. Arthur frowns.

“It’s not that I’m afraid to die,” he murmurs. “But you were immortal anyway, weren’t you?”

Merlin nods, jaw set.

Arthur sighs. “I don’t want you left alone, that’s all. God knows you can’t go five minutes without getting into some kind of trouble, imagine what—”

“Don't,” Merlin cuts in. His voice wavers. “Don’t joke about this.”

There’s quiet for a minute. Arthur waits for Merlin to get himself back under control, thumbs pressing into his eyes; he knows he has something more to say.

Sure enough: “It doesn’t matter.”

“I’m sorry?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Merlin repeats firmly. “Whether you’re mortal now or not, it makes no difference. It’s never made a difference. I’m not going to be here when you’re gone.”

It takes a second for the words to compute, and then it feels rather like a kick to the gut. Arthur shakes his head like he can shake the matter-of-fact statement away with it.

“Merlin—”

“No, listen, I’m not being melodramatic.” An intake of breath. “I’ve lived a long time, all right? A _really_ long time. And that’s enough. If I get to have you for one normal, human lifetime, that’s—” His voice cracks. “That’s more than enough. I don’t need anything else.”

There’s far too much emotion filling up this small space, clogging up Arthur’s throat and making his eyes sting. Honestly, he thinks, Merlin has well and truly ruined him.

“So what you’re saying,” he says eventually, “is that I’m never going to be rid of you? Not even in the afterlife?”

Merlin grins at him. “Not even then.”

Arthur heaves a put-upon sigh. “Ah, well. Suppose it can’t hurt to be charitable once in a whi— _mmf_.”

That’s as far as the conversation gets, Merlin’s mouth opening against his, and part of Arthur thinks it’s a bit unfair, because there’d been more he wanted to say. Like the fact that Mordred had specified the return of their _human_ forms, and what is immortality if not an inhuman trait?

But the bigger part of him thinks they’ve gone far too long without being able to do this to pass up the opportunity now, so he closes his eyes and he stops wondering.

There’ll be time for that later. Years and years and years.


	12. Chapter 12

It’s two weeks before his mum lets him out of the house. Which Mordred gets, really he does, and he knows he’s lucky he’s not on lockdown for the rest of his natural life, but it’s a little maddening knowing he just upended two people’s lives and can’t even call them to check in.

The way things are now, it could almost have been a dream. He’s taken to floating small objects across his bedroom just to remind himself it’d been real, it had _happened_.

So when his mum finally does let him off the leash, albeit with repeated and highly descriptive warnings about what will happen if he turns his phone GPS off again, Mordred makes a beeline for the bookshop.

It feels nice to walk outside now that the heat wave has finally broken, but Mordred is too distracted to appreciate it. He half expects to find the shop closed down, or maybe disappeared entirely—Merlin could do it, he knows he could.

But it’s still there when he turns the corner, _Ealdor Books_ and its dragon mascot proudly emblazoned over the doorway.

The sight calms his pulse a bit.

He pushes his way inside, the little tinkling bell over the door announcing his presence like it had the first time. “Hello?”

There’s a thumping noise from somewhere in the vicinity of the back room. Mordred frowns. “Arthur? Merlin?”

Arthur half-stumbles out of the room like he’s been shoved, looking slightly disheveled. He doesn’t seem displeased that Mordred’s there, though, which is nice.

“Mordred! We were starting to wonder if you’d vanished.”

“Yeah, sorry about that,” Mordred says sheepishly. “My mum…”

“That was what we figured,” Merlin says, appearing out of nowhere. His hair is a mess and there are definitely misaligned buttons happening there. Mordred sort of wants to soak his brain in the nearest bottle of bleach—honestly, how is _he_ the teenager in this equation?

“How is she holding up?” Merlin continues, hopping up to sit on the desk, oblivious to the twitch Mordred’s no doubt developing.

He snaps out of it. “She’s, erm, good. I think.” There’d been a lot of crying that night in the hospital, although Mordred knows that couldn’t all be blamed on his mother. She’d practically squeezed his lungs up through his throat and then shouted for about an hour. He has the feeling she would’ve done his head in if he hadn’t gone and cracked it open already, but then she probably would’ve concussed him anyway so maybe he’d just saved her the trouble. “She doesn’t understand why I did it, though. Not really. Thinks someone at school was giving me a hard time. She seemed impressed I kept getting my assignments done, though.” Which is probably the only reason she’s letting him finish out the school year in the first place.

“Well, maybe someday you’ll be able to tell her the truth.”

Mordred snorts. “Yeah. Right.”

Merlin raises an eyebrow. He does that a lot, Mordred’s discovered, and it’s weirdly disconcerting, so this time he tries to mimic it right back.

Arthur makes a noise like he’s choking.

“Did he just _Gaius_ you?” he asks with a note of barely-hidden delight.

Merlin glares. “I’ve decided I’m going to go back to loathing the both of you,” he announces. “Feel free to leave my shop at any time.”

“Speaking of,” Mordred says, noticing something, “why isn’t anyone here? Isn’t today Mrs. So-And-So’s day to drop off another load of Agatha Christie novels?”

Arthur and Merlin exchange a look. Mordred frowns.

“What is it?”

“We’ve decided to close the shop,” Merlin says.

The words take a second to hit. “What? But—why?”

Merlin smiles a bit sadly. “Because we’ve been sitting still for centuries,” he says. “And now, with everything that’s happened…” He trails off.

“It’s time to move on,” Arthur says.

The words feel like they’re stuck in his throat, but Mordred forces them out anyway. “Is that the only reason? There’s not—I mean—”

Arthur’s looking at him like he knows exactly what Mordred’s thinking. “It’s got nothing to do with you, if that’s what—”

“Actually,” Merlin interrupts, “it’s got everything to do with him.”

In another situation, Mordred would probably think it’s funny how his and Arthur’s heads swivel toward Merlin at the exact same time. Some other situation where it doesn’t feel like his insides are being stomped on by someone in stilettos.

Merlin meets both their gazes defiantly. “Well, it does. Of course it does.” He stands up and focuses on Mordred, who suddenly feels like he should be holding his breath.

“You’re the reason we’re like this, now. You’re the reason we can be around each other as _people_ again, how can this not have everything to do with you?” Merlin bites his lip. “The world’s massive, you know, and we haven’t gotten a good look at it for _ages_. And we—we can now, thanks to you. That’s why we’re leaving.”

He sounds uncertain, like some long-held instinct is berating him for giving Mordred credit for anything. But he doesn’t look away and he doesn’t take it back, and all Mordred can do is blink repeatedly and hope his face doesn’t give him away.

“And also because if I never see another browned page or leather cover again in my lifetime, it’ll be too soon,” Arthur adds, breaking the tension.

Mordred huffs a laugh and Merlin smirks.

“You just want to avoid doing any more carpentry,” he says.

“Of course,” Arthur replies archly. “It’s not natural for kings to be doing manual labor all the time. That’s what I have you for.”

Merlin lets out an indulgent sigh. “Somehow it always comes back to this.”

“ _And_ ,” is the pointed response, “there’s the fact that someone here decided to use magic in full view of the general public. Someone who, I believe, likes to lecture others about the importance of subtlety.”

“Won’t they think it’s street magic though?” Mordred cuts in with a prickle of worry. “A hoax, or a publicity stunt or something?”

Merlin waves them off. “I’m not really concerned about it, to be honest. Like I told you before, people are much more cynical these days. Even if someone did manage to catch me on video or something, the chances that people will believe it’s legitimate are basically nothing.”

“But you’re still leaving.”

“Soon as we can get things squared away here,” Merlin confirms. “Finish some orders, apologize to some regulars, things like that. I don’t think we’ll be shut down forever, but, well…”

Mordred finishes for him. “You don’t know when you’ll be back.”

_If you’ll be back._

He swallows hard, blinking back the sudden bizarre urge to cry. This is stupid. He hasn’t known them long, after all—except he sort of has, and these are the kinds of things he wishes he had more time to clarify before the two of them go skipping off into the sunset.

“Well, erm. Thanks, I guess,” he mumbles, not sure what else to say.

Arthur snaps his fingers. “Hold on, before we start with all that—I’d almost forgotten something.”

He disappears up the stairs to the flat, leaving Mordred alone with Merlin and the still-awkward silence that sits like a massive third person alongside them.

“We’ll come back someday,” Merlin says hesitantly. “Maybe not for a long time, but…when all’s said and done, this place is still our home. Always has been.”

Mordred knows he’s not talking about the bookshop.

“You’d better,” he says. “I still say you’ve done a shit job of teaching me about magic, so you owe me a few proper lessons.”

Merlin gives him a sharp look, but it’s not as discomfiting as it used to be. “I don’t think you’ll need much more coaching, to be honest. You managed to get the Sidhe to come around somehow, and no offense, but I don’t think it had much to do with your amazing diplomatic skills.”

“Does that make you nervous?” Mordred asks, not sure he wants to know the answer.

Another long, careful look.

“No,” Merlin says. He sounds surprised about it. “That’s a little off-putting.”

“Welcome to my year,” Mordred retorts, the sarcasm doing a nice job of hiding his relief. Fortunately, Arthur chooses that moment to make his return.

“Right,” Arthur says, lifting up a long, thin box and setting it carefully on the desk. “Mordred, this is for you.”

Mordred looks to Merlin, whose expression reveals nothing, and then to Arthur, who seems perfectly calm, before stepping forward to get a good look at the box. It’s plain wood, nothing fancy. It doesn’t even look that old.

He looks at both of them suspiciously. “Is this a joke? If you’ve stuck a broomstick in here or something, I’m not getting on it.”

“No broomsticks,” Arthur says over Merlin’s outraged sputtering. (Somewhere, somehow, Mordred has the feeling J.K. Rowling is about to come down with a sudden and not quite natural cold.) “Open it.”

Unaccountably nervous all of a sudden, Mordred reaches for the box. He runs his fingers down the lid. There’s no dust on it, so either Arthur is really good about dusting (really, really doubtful) or…

He pulls back, palms sweating. Arthur is watching him with more intensity than the situation should really warrant.

“It, erm.” Mordred clears his throat. “It feels like Avalon did. Like it’s got some sort of…aura, or something. I don’t know.”

Arthur nods like he’s making complete sense instead of sounding like a blithering idiot, but Mordred doesn’t know how else to describe the feeling he’s got, like there’s some kind of quiet power humming just under the surface of the wood. Like the dust doesn’t dare settle, doesn’t dare disrespect a magic as old as Avalon itself.

“Mordred.” There’s a quiet power in that too, but a power nonetheless, so Mordred looks up. Arthur is looking at him seriously. “It’s not going to hurt you.”

Mordred believes him.

Before he can stop to think about it, he reaches over and lifts the lid from the box.

He sees a sword. But it’s more than that, so much more that it actually takes Mordred’s breath away. He knows nothing about swords, and this one is beautiful—gold on the hilt and the pommel, runes carved all down the blade, glinting too brightly for the dull light of a rainy afternoon—but he doesn’t think the craftsmanship is what’s making him go all starstruck. No, it’s that same sense of power, that _thrum_ under his skin and in his bones.

Arthur lifts the sword from its case and turns to Mordred.

The sight of him standing there with that sword in his hand, even when he’s wearing a T-shirt and jeans, makes something in Mordred crumble. Scarlet fabric flickers at the corner of his vision, but he looks and there’s nothing there. Somehow it doesn’t matter. Some mad thing inside him still wants to go down on his knees and swear fealty.

He knows, suddenly, what the weight of that sword on his shoulder would feel like.

“This is a loan, you understand,” Arthur is saying. Mordred forces himself to listen. “For some reason, they’re less forgiving about carrying sharp objects across international borders these days. I want you to look after this until we return.”

He offers the sword, its blade flat across his palms. A shudder runs down Mordred’s spine and then back up again.

“Will you do that?” Arthur asks.

All Mordred can do is nod.

Arthur smiles, and the spell is broken. “Good, because the other option was having Merlin try to make it invisible during transit, and I’m not at all certain that would have ended well.”

Behind them, Merlin sighs. “One time. I mess up the extremely complicated invisibility spell _one time_ and I’ll be on my deathbed before he lets me forget it.”

Mordred reaches for the sword and takes it reverently. Or maybe ‘gingerly’ is a better word for it; now that the initial shock of the thing has worn off a bit, he’s starting to become properly concerned about caring for an extremely ancient object.

“I’m not a museum curator, you know?” he says, dubious.

“Really? And here I thought you’d spent weeks surrounded by old relics.” Merlin smirks. “Present company included.”

He looks so pleased with himself, too. Mordred groans. “See, that right there is the reason I remember that you’re an old man—you make jokes like that. It’s sad, is what it is.”

Merlin hums thoughtfully, leaning back against the desk. “That reminds me, actually. You remember you were asking me about the old man who owned this shop, before? The odd one?”

“Er, yeah. Why?”

“Not much, just…” He fiddles with his sleeves. “I managed to get in touch with him, and he’s doing well. Really well.”

“That’s good,” Mordred says uncertainly. “He’s still around, then?”

“Yeah, still around.” Merlin’s gaze flicks briefly to Arthur. “He doesn’t know for how much longer, though.”

Mordred thinks about it. “It’s not all bad though, is it? I mean, he’s got to be ancient by now. Probably lived a brilliant life and all.”

“Probably. I think he’ll end up being glad of the rest, to be honest.”

“When it’s time,” Arthur says quietly. “And not before.”

Merlin looks over at him properly. He smiles, the corners of his eyes crinkling up, and all of a sudden he looks much younger than Mordred’s ever seen him.

“Well, who knows? He’s probably still in for some surprises, even if he is ancient.”

“Too right,” Mordred blurts. “I mean, I just found out _fairies_ exist and I’m only fourteen, so.”

Arthur and Merlin both sort of blink at him for a second.

He’s not sure who starts snickering first, but it gets all of them eventually, laughter making Mordred’s stomach hurt as he gasps for breath.

He doesn’t want it to stop.

.

.

He takes the sword home (and it’s still “the sword” in his mind, Mordred doesn’t think he’s ready yet to call it by the name he knows it carries) and slides the box underneath his bed. He feels its power humming through him as he falls asleep, but the feeling gets less disconcerting and more comforting as time goes on.

He also stops having the dreams. He doesn’t know if these things are connected and he doesn’t really care, because it’s fantastic, not being afraid to go to sleep. Mordred isn’t going to question anything that makes that possible.

The next time he goes to visit the shop, it’s closed like he imagined it would be, the door locked and the painted sign looking somewhat forlorn without any customers passing underneath it.

But Mordred was expecting it, so it doesn’t hurt like it might have otherwise.

He wonders who’s going to take over the dusty book trade (because it’s a damn good shop, and if anyone thinks they’re going to just mow it down Mordred is going to give them something else to think about). He wonders if maybe they’ll have a use for a teenage boy with some Dewey experience.

Well, who knows what’s going to happen? After dealing with all this destiny stuff that, frankly, still seems like a load of bullshit, Mordred’s more than ready for some unpredictability. He’s even stopped praying to luck lately. After all, he’s got his own magic under control now; it doesn’t seem fair to borrow the supernatural from some other source.

And on the subject of magic…

Mordred’s not an idiot; he checks first to make sure no one’s around. He doesn’t have a spell for this one, but he thinks it’s worth a go anyway. Just to see.

He closes his eyes, tries to get the shape of what he wants to do clear in his mind. His magic almost feels like it’s humming, interested but not overeager. Which is why, when Mordred opens his eyes and flicks his fingers toward _Ealdor_ ’s sign, he feels like it’s actually going to work.

The painted dragon on the sign moves.

It’s not much in the grand scheme of things—an uncurling of the back, a stretch of the tail—and it’s gone in the blink of an eye, but damn if that isn’t an image Mordred’s going to hang onto.

It’s not every day you get to bring a dragon to life.

Giving the shop one last look, Mordred sticks his hands in his pockets and smiles. He turns his back and starts walking in the other direction.

.

.

“Merlin! What’s there to say about Rome that hasn’t been said a thousand times already?”

Their hotel room is slightly smaller than a shoebox, so even from the other end of it Arthur can hear Merlin groan.

“Could this conversation possibly have waited until I was out of the shower?”

“Unable to multitask in your old age?” Arthur retorts, and grins as Merlin swears at him. He returns his attention to the card in his hand. Honestly, they traded in Post-Its for postcards ages ago; you’d think he’d have gotten the hang of this by now.

“Sod it,” he announces. “‘ _Dear Mordred: Rome is filled with rocks. Very old rocks. Fascinating stuff. Regards_ —’”

“I will hex you if you write that, and I won’t feel bad about it in the slightest,” Merlin warns. The shower turns off. “And don’t think I didn’t notice you practically drooling over the Coliseum. There’s something to be said for very old rocks.”

Actually, Arthur finds more of this stuff interesting than he lets on. But Merlin absolutely lives and breathes it, so naturally Arthur has to play the ignorant sybarite on occasion just to get him riled up. Riling Merlin up is one of his great pleasures in life.

What can he say? He’s a man of simple tastes.

“The way I see it,” Merlin continues, but the sentence is cut off by a crash of the hotel-property-hitting-the-floor variety.

Arthur sighs. “Really, Merlin, I understand that walking and talking at the same time is a challenge for you, but I was hoping _not_ to pay this hotel for damages.”

He doesn’t get a single barbed word of reply, which is concerning. Arthur frowns, sets down the still-blank postcard and heads to the bathroom.

“Are you all—Merlin, what on earth are you doing?”

Merlin, standing there with a towel wrapped around his waist, doesn’t answer him. He doesn’t even seem to have noticed that Arthur’s in the room. He’s rubbed a clear circle in the sheet of fog covering the mirror and is all but pushing his face into it, long fingers holding up a haphazard section of fringe.

“And you call me a narcissist,” Arthur remarks. And then, when not even that gets a response, “What’s so fascinating? Is the mirror cursed? Are we going to be forced to defend the hapless townsfolk from some ancient evil?”

Merlin blinks several times in quick succession before turning around, eyes wide.

“Arthur,” he says shakily. “Look at this.”

“At…your hair?” Arthur asks, nonplussed.

“Just _look_.”

“All right, all right.” He moves closer, replaces Merlin’s fingers with his own and squints at the offending fringe. There doesn’t seem to be anything peculiar about it, and Arthur’s about to say so, but then Merlin shifts and the light hits it just right and _oh_.

His expression must change because Merlin’s eyes get even wider.

“I’m not imagining it, am I?” he whispers. “It’s—it’s grey, isn’t it?”

“Silver,” Arthur confirms, numbly trying to wrap his mind around the idea of a Merlin whose hair isn’t stubbornly dark. It’s been dark for as long as they’ve known each other. “Does that mean…”

Merlin’s beaming like someone just handed him the sun, moon and stars all at once. It’s answer enough.

Slowly, Arthur lowers his hand. “Figures you’d go grey early, with all the worrying you do,” he manages.

“Oh shut up, you absolute prat,” Merlin replies, and pulls him in for a thorough kiss.

It’s all going rather nicely until the idiot breaks the kiss by laughing.

Arthur pulls back, starting to smile despite himself. “Should I be offended?”

“No, it’s just—” Merlin shakes his head. “I just realized we’re going to be grumpy old men.”

“I think we’ve technically been old men for a long time, although I wouldn’t call myself grumpy.” Arthur considers. “You, on the other hand…”

Merlin smacks him in the arm, although the effect is ruined somewhat by the massive grin he can’t seem to wipe off his face. “I mean, we’re even going to _look_ like old men. No magic required.”

Arthur tries to picture it, the pair of them wrinkled and grey, but the image won’t stick. He can’t imagine either of them _old_ , truly old, the way Dragoon the Great never quite managed to look.

“So, does that mean we’ll have to start complaining about the daily news?” he asks at last.

Merlin nods thoughtfully. “Also about anything different. And anyone younger than us, of course, can’t forget that.”

“Of course.” Arthur starts laughing; he can’t help himself. “We’d make terrible old men. This is going to be ridiculous.”

Merlin’s eyes are sparkling with mirth, and Arthur thinks that no matter how old they get or how long they’re together, that sight is always going to make something in his chest go tight.

“Close, but wrong adjective,” Merlin says.

Arthur rolls his eyes. “I await my enlightenment.”

“I think you meant, ‘we’re going to be brilliant’.”

And while he will insist to the end of his days that Merlin’s not often right, in this case Arthur is more than willing to concede the point.

.

**_The End_ **

.


End file.
